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“... Voici le temps des assassins,’ Rimbaud announced in the wake of the Paris Commune. One could argue that the central motif in Modernism was the notion of violation: André Breton saying that ‘the simplest surrealist act consists of dashing into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can, into the crowd’; Otto Dix portraying a crazed murderer dismembering a female body, flinging limbs hither and thither; Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí slitting an eyeball with a razor in the unwatchable opening sequence of Un Chien andalou ...”

“... partly explains his fascination for the Bloomsbury set: war and sexuality were his main concerns. Modris Eksteins explains the way Nijinsky seemed to summon the peculiar worries of the age. ‘Nijinsky was the faun,’ he writes, ‘a wild creature temporarily trapped by society. Imagine, they said to themselves, this incredible physical specimen, given ...”

“... a firm basis for such tremendous generalisations. Such generalisations are also the business of Modris Eksteins’s book, though the pivotal period is now moved on, surely reasonably, to 1914-18. Reminiscent in some ways of Paul Fussell’s work, and of Robert Wohl’s The Generation of 1914 in others, this book has a thesis. Like Wolff’s, it works ...”

“... the well-informed and opinionated reports and debates carried in newspapers and magazines. But, as Modris Eksteins showed in The Limits of Reason (1975), the industry was supporting too many barely profitable titles, and so ran into financial trouble in the Depression, enabling businesses like the chemical company I.G. Farben to buy up shares. I.G. Farben ...”