“... and it was there, on her arrival, that Hannah Arendt deposited the surviving manuscripts of Walter Benjamin. Characteristically, and perhaps accurately, she thought that the Frankfurt people handled them dishonestly. New York in the Fifties was Weimar in partibus. There are emigrations and emigrations. Chateaubriand elegantly described the French emigration of ...”

“... rhythmic loops of Indian music kickstarted his first pieces of minimalism. A generation earlier, Benjamin Britten had been entranced by Shankar’s first British performances. Yehudi Menuhin’s reputation as a child prodigy was built on the recording he made of Elgar’s Violin Concerto in 1932, but he too was steered onto a different path by Shankar.It’s ...”

“... had been wearing which were so incredibly loud in colour. And Matisse, exasperated, answered “Black, obviously”.’ It was a joke. But the joke was a good one; and therefore it concentrated an amount of conscious and unconscious thinking in a single reversal of terms. The joke set me thinking straight away of Baudelaire’s choice of ...”

“... and inconsequence. Love in a Life offers anecdotes in search of a narrative. Death, as Walter Benjamin implied, gives life to stories, and intimations of mortality recur in Motion’s anecdotes. The opening poem evokes, with hallucinatory vividness, a dream-vision of ‘last century’s man ... / (spats and port waistcoat / in clackety half-light)’ on a ...”

“... being the, in retrospect, remarkably undistinguished all-Palestinians-are-terrorists thriller Black Sunday. Red Dragon’s back story, as these things are called in Hollywood, is that Graham is the man who caught Dr Lecter, thanks to his special ability to enter the imaginative world of serial killers. (One period touch is that in those days – Red ...”

“... is appropriate to the extravagance of the myth. Parallels with some of Heinrich Mann’s black comedies, with the use of fable and grotesquerie in The Tin Drum, perhaps with Marquez, come to mind. Syberberg uses Brechtian techniques of alienation (placards, back-projection, narrative monologue) to achieve the same distancing effect. But he does not ...”

“... and omissions. The scope of the inclusions is certainly impressive, with attention given to black and woman writers and to a broader range of British writing than might have been expected from an American critic: there can be few readers who will not find ways into new poetic territory from this enthusiastically written book. Perkins is at times forced ...”

“... Tzara, Hilberseimer, van Doesburg … Lissitzky, Gabo, Pevszner [sic], Kiesler, Man Ray, Soupault, Benjamin, Hausmann etc’ – an impressive roll-call.In 1927, aged 41 and at the vanguard of modern architecture, Mies was invited to plan a showcase development in Stuttgart, the Weissenhofsiedlung, for which he invited 15 collaborators, including Gropius, Le ...”

“... war into an anti-aircraft unit, from which he deserted. He supported his family after the war by black-market dealing while he worked for his Abitur, before studying literature and philosophy at German universities and the Sorbonne. After completing a dissertation on the Romantic writer Clemens Brentano in 1955, he worked as a radio editor in Stuttgart. The ...”

“... it meant ‘to see yet another generation going cheerfully off to face death’. Inspecting the Black Watch she had an unsettling moment of déjà vu, seeing her nephew in uniform. ‘I thought for an awful moment that it was my brother Fergus who was killed in France when serving with the same regiment. It was only for one second – a flash, a family ...”

“... eggs from the surrounding jelly, he noted that their outward covering mostly consisted of ‘small black dots’ – knobbly, ‘like shagreen leather’ – below which there lay ‘watery fluid, and an incredible number of globules, each of which globules again consisted of a large number of smaller globules, each of which had in its centre a larger ...”

“... pearlescent creamware (called ‘Queensware’ after Queen Charlotte bought a table service) to black ‘basalt’, which was matte and sooty as a lump of coal and often painted with red figures in imitation of ancient vases. Wedgwood was always trying to make his vases seem ‘un-pot-like’, to lift them out of the earthy associations of clay and make ...”

“... Relations among the European states would henceforth be driven by a new and unfamiliar dynamic. Benjamin Disraeli makes no appearance in Chrastil’s book, but he saw the problem more clearly than most: ‘This war represents the German Revolution, a greater political event than the French,’ he declared in the House of Commons on 9 February 1871. There ...”

“... as into another sea.’ It’s distinctive, too, in providing the illusion of a living history: black-hatted men still stride across the campo of the ghetto, buy pastries at Gam Gam, the kosher restaurant. It’s easy to feel you’ve stepped back a few centuries. But the men are Chabad-Lubavitchers, mostly from the US and Israel, who invite secular and ...”

“... novels that are praised on social media as ‘discursive’ and ‘weird’ (e.g. the work of Benjamin Labatut or Jenny Erpenbeck). Unfortunately, Creation Lake is a sloppy book whose careless construction and totalising cynicism come to feel downright hostile. As I read, I kept wondering, why did you even write this?Sadie Smith (the name did make me ...”