“... within months of each other in 1917; finally her unheroic, musical, stubborn little brother, Edward, was shot in the hills above Vicenza in June 1918. Brittain also returned to Oxford in 1919, ‘a ghost too dazed to feel the full fury of her own resentment’ as she put it. She found herself plagued by the illusion of a witch’s beard sprouting on her ...”

“... true that Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although we loved the old rogue for the rodomontade and sheer cheek of his rhetoric, we got ...”

“... no Chagall, no Freud or Rubinstein to protect us with a legacy of glorious achievements,’ Edward Said wrote of the Palestinians in 1986. ‘We have had no Holocaust to protect us with the world’s compassion. We are “other”, and opposite, a flaw in the geometry of resettlement and exodus.’ Palestinians are still ‘others’ in the moral ...”

“... of seventy cities on which thermonuclear bombs would be dropped, from Moscow and St Petersburg to Berlin, Potsdam, Warsaw and most of what is now Ukraine and Belarus. In 1960, the generals completed a comprehensive plan for a first-strike attack, the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP-62. In the case of non-nuclear conflict with the Soviet bloc, the ...”

“... Oslo Accords, even as they were denounced, presciently, by some of his Palestinian friends as, in Edward Said’s words, ‘a Palestinian Versailles’. Warschawski was acutely aware that Oslo failed to secure a freeze on settlements, and that it could transform the Palestinian Authority into Israel’s gendarme. Still, he held out the hope that the Accords ...”

“... looks almost foreordained, since Hall tells us that Gellner’s upwardly mobile father had gone to Berlin in the early 1920s ‘to find out more about Max Weber, who had recently died, and whom he came to admire greatly’. Seventy years later, that Prague student’s quip was spot-on: the vignette would not have seemed so telling had he chosen to compare his ...”

“... by the American writers David Christian and Cynthia Stokes Brown – or, in the terminology of Edward O. Wilson, in a ‘consilience’, a convergence of intellectual disciplines, humanities with science. Ultimately, all teaching in the fine arts department pays a kind of homage to self-will. First defined in the 15th century by Leonardo Bruni as studies ...”

“... the British in the 1920s and was the nominal leader of the Arab nationalists, fled to Germany. In Berlin, he made common cause with the Nazis, thus discrediting the nationalist movement. When he returned after the war, he was as interested in fending off rival Palestinian leaders and Arab states – notably Egypt and Transjordan, which had their own designs ...”

“... Splintered Man, featured a CIA agent subjected to a nightmarish interrogation under LSD in East Berlin; it ended with an exhortation to US intelligence not to be left playing catch-up in the battle for the mind. The Bond movies led CIA officers to investigate the real-life feasibility of Q’s gadgets.Richard Condon’s book The Manchurian Candidate ...”

“... the private members’ bill in the Lords that led two years later to the Sexual Offences Act.) Sir Edward Boulton, ‘baronet-stockbroker’, was gagged, bound and robbed by a guardsman he’d met in a pub and invited back to his flat for a conversation about ‘landscape gardening’. This delicately ludicrous detail quite possibly conveys the actual pick-up ...”

“... sociologists and theologians, students of the symbolic rather than the technical. Lorraine Daston Berlin It’s Islamic fundamentalism, not The Satanic Verses, that represents a blasphemous version of the Koran. Most ideology, however, works by a distinction between what one does and what one says one does, such that the one does not impinge too ...”

“... his contemporary, Johannes Müller, the professor of physiology and anatomy at Bonn and then Berlin, did basic research on the way sensory nerves work, wrote the century’s leading physiology textbook, founded Europe’s major journal in the field and a dynasty which produced mountains of experimental validation for the proposition that the body was ...”

“... about cohabitation and for bringing diasporic values back to that region. This was also no doubt Edward Said’s point when, in Freud and the Non-European, he called for the exilic histories of both Jews and Palestinians to serve as the basis for a new polity in Palestine.The Galut is thus not a fallen realm in need of redemption, even though it is precisely ...”

“... content. He was not the only actor of his age to have developed a ‘great melody’ – Edward Gibbon was another – but he has to be known in this way, and Dr O’Brien has set out to depict the ‘great melody’ as formed by what he was and by the grand issues – the themes to which the subtitle alludes – to which he gave himself. This is not ...”

“... Fighting off the attempted depredations of marauding Baconians, scholars such as Edward Dowden (one of the first Human beings ever to earn his living by teaching Shakespeare) related the plays to an imaginary, Darwinesque, smoothly evolutionary ‘life’ of the playwright, whose narrative embodied many of the age’s presuppositions ...”