[2] In the 1950s, together with Jacques Derrida,[3] he took hypokhâgne and khâgne at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand but, contrary to a persistent legend, he failed three times to be accepted at the École Normale Supérieure.

[4] This setback, which he shared with his school-mate Pierre Vidal-Naquet, was one which Nora came to regard as a stroke of luck, particularly in terms of the example set by another friend, Jean-François Revel,[5] since it led him to live a far more interesting life than would otherwise have been the case, contrasting his own situation with that of Gérard Granel.

Through him Nora met his first love, the Madagascan Marthe Cazal (1907–1983), a major model for the figure of Justine in Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet.

Ben Bella was under the impression that Nora, whose account of Algeria he had read with admiration while in prison, was a member of the local Algerian Jewish community.

In 1965 he joined Éditions Gallimard: the publishing house, which already had a good market share in literature, wanted to develop its social sciences sector.

A further reason, Nora mentioned to a third party, was that the Shoah by then had moved to the centre of cultural memory and the word Auschwitz only appeared once in Hobsbawm's book.

Nora explained that context of hostility towards Communism in France was not appropriate to that type of publication, that all the editors, "like it or not, had an obligation to take account of the intellectual and ideological situation in which they had written their works".

Nora is equally well known for having directed Les Lieux de Mémoire, three volumes which gave as their point the work of enumerating the places and the objects in which are the incarnate national memory of the French.

David Prochaska, American historian of French Algeria argues that it is in fact "not based on original research and is devoid of the usual scholarly apparatus".

[c][d] In 2001, on the occasion of his induction into the Académie française in the wake of the death of the novelist Michel Droit, he had his ceremonial sword inscribed with the Star of David to attest to his feeling that 'the Jewish contribution to the world belongs to things of the mind more than to weaponry.