The word 'alain' is not a commonly used word in written English.
It is a French masculine name, but can also be used as a surname. It is not considered a regular English word, so it may not be appropriate to use in most written contexts. Example: Alain had always dreamed of becoming a world-renowned chef, and he finally achieved his goal after years of hard work and dedication.
The former is indelibly stitched into French film history thanks to her breakthrough role in Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour way back in 1959, though she has also made films for Georges Franju and Jean-Pierre Melville.
Alain Enthoven, an economist at Stanford University's business school who helped inspire the "managed health care" movement of the 1990s, promoted an approach that succeeded in squeezing costs at the time, but ultimately failed as patients rebelled against the restrictions it placed on their choice of doctors and treatments.
ALAIN DE POUZILHAC, the chairman of Havas, a leading French advertising agency, pulled out all the stops to buy Grey Global, an American rival.
Alain Duhamel, a commentator, suggests that these days "'Le Petit Journal' has much more real influence than the front page of Le Monde".
THE FORBIDDEN IMAGE: AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF ICONOCLASM.By Alain Besancon.University of Chicago; 440 pages; $40 and £25.50KISS a snapshot and you commit an act of idolatry.
ALAIN DE BOTTON is always worth a read, for both the clarity of his prose and his ability to force us to reassess our attitudes to the familiar.
The author, Alain-Fournier, met this woman on a bridge in real life, and her mother was the kind of person who knew which bridge it was and we would stand there.
The top three Mr Sarkozy, Ms Royal and the centrist François Bayrou bagged 76% between them, compared with 47% for their counterparts (plus a liberal, Alain Madelin) in 2002.
One of the minor literary hits on the Parisian scene in recent months has been a biography of actor-journalist Alain Pacadis, the "punk dandy" who presided over Le Palace, the nightclub that was the Studio 54 of Paris in the 1980s.
The constant threat of violence was matched by a wave of massively disruptive strikes provoked by prime minister Alain Juppé's austerity measures.
In 1988, he joined McLaren as Alain Prost's team-mate and from there one of the greatest rivalries in F1 history played out.
