Apostrophes was a live,[1] weekly, literary, prime-time, talk show on French television[2] created and hosted by Bernard Pivot.
It ran for fifteen years[2] (724 episodes) from January 10, 1975, to June 22, 1990, and was one of the most watched shows on French television[1][3] (around 6 million regular viewers[1]).
[1][2] Notable authors who appeared on the show included: Vladimir Nabokov, Norman Mailer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Marguerite Yourcenar, Susan Sontag, Neil Sheehan, Milan Kundera, Georges Simenon, William Styron,[3] John le Carré, Tom Wolfe,[1] Umberto Eco, Marguerite Duras, Arthur Miller, and Doris Lessing.
[4] The show also invited political figures (Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the Dalai Lama, Robert Badinter, François Mitterrand), intellectuals, historians, sociologists (Pierre Bourdieu, Claude Lévi-Strauss), actors and directors (Marcello Mastroianni, Roman Polanski, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard) to discuss their books and literature.
(Inspired by Pivot, James Lipton, the host of the U.S. TV program Inside the Actors Studio, gives an adapted version of the Proust Questionnaire to some of his guests.)