“... gods.’ Hrabal, who was born in 1914 in Moravia, started writing poems under the influence of French Surrealism. The poems quickly squared their shoulders and became paragraphs: prose poems, epiphanic jottings, broken anecdotes. The Prague Revue (No. 5) recently printed a number of these early poems, written in the 1940s, and many of them are touched with ...”

“... his initial presentation of the project, was an inventory of all those realms of remembrance where French identity could be said to have symbolically crystallised.Under this capacious heading, 127 essays – most of high quality – surveyed a bewildering potpourri of subjects, ranging from such obvious items as the Tricolour, the Marseillaise and the ...”

“... and an Enlightenment classicist, born at the very end of the 18th century (1799), and, like Karl Kraus’s definition of the historian, something of a prophet facing backwards. Romanticism, properly seen, was ‘the absence of all Rules but not the absence of art’. Hence Shakespeare, ‘our Father’, was a Romantic. Pushkin certainly came under the ...”

“... parents could help subsidise their life abroad. They had studied at the academic gymnasium, where French and German were compulsory subjects, unlike the mainly lower-class committee men, whose secondary education, if they had one, was in seminaries (one foreign language required) or trade schools (none).Used to operating within the cosmopolitan world of the ...”

“... be exploited economically and used as political scapegoats. What happened with Nazism was what the French would call a dérapage – a blunder, a skid, a loss of control. Or perhaps it was the genie getting out of the bottle. It was acceptable to be racist up to the point of a final solution, but no further. It had always been a delicate game, and no doubt ...”

“... Europe in the 1830s and 1840s – is the most fascinating part of his book. The trauma left by the French Revolution – the Terror and the Napoleonic conquests – was wearing off. In July 1830 Paris rose, expelling the Bourbon dynasty. Revolution became terrifyingly contagious: Belgium rebelled and won its independence; violent protest broke out in parts of ...”

“... action on my temperament and fashioned my still plastic character.’ It was thus that, whereas French was his language as an intellectual, English (for all of Ford’s would-be-Gallic complaints of its unsuitability for literature) was his chosen language as an artist. It need not surprise us, therefore, that the qualities which he embraced ...”

“... was a good thing, a bad thing, or neither or both. An early entrant in this Historikerstreit was Karl Marx. In the summer of 1853, he wrote two articles on British rule in India in the New York Daily Tribune. He wrote that ‘the profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it ...”

“... conventional. A frequent accusation levelled against Kinsey by, among others, the psychiatrist Karl Menninger, was that he studied sexual behaviour and not love. The film chooses this as its moral and it ends with Kinsey having a Damascus moment, parking his car to run around a forest with his wife, hugging trees and chasing deer to the sound of ...”

“... to withdraw his demand, a truck bomb exploded at the CPA’s entrance, killing 23 and wounding 95. Karl Rove, not Condoleezza Rice – and not Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld – deals this corner of the game, one of whose objectives is to rebrand the president as a man of peace. Thus, the White House has retreated from pre-emptive and preventive war with both ...”

“... Working​ on Capital in the British Museum, plagued by creditors and carbuncles, Karl Marx complained not only that nobody had ever written so much about money and had so little of it, but that ‘this economic crap’ was keeping him from writing his big book on Balzac. His work is studded with allusions to Homer, Sophocles, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe and scores of other authors, though he was less enthralled by ‘Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet’ Edmund Spenser, an advocate of state terror in Ireland ...”

“... view of psychoanalysis is a politer and more circuitous version of the celebrated jibe in which Karl Kraus defined it as ‘that spiritual disease of which it considers itself to be the cure’. And Kraus himself, the arch-accuser of a misbegotten 20th century, provides Heller with the occasion for another tribute to the redeeming and reparative power of ...”

“... qualified by the need to exercise them responsibly or suffer the legal consequences. Even in the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) deployed the balance in remarkably sober terms: ‘The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write and print ...”

“... War and Peace, young Nikolai Rostov first rides, into action with his fellow hussars against the French at Austerlitz, he feels that the longed-for time has come ‘to experience the intoxication of a charge’, about which he has heard so much. At first he is indeed elated, but then the unseen enemy suddenly becomes visible, Rostov’s horse is shot under ...”

“... not and looked it up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I learnt that its founder, the 19th-century French philosopher August Comte, called his Cours de Philosophie ‘Positive’, because it was concerned only with positive facts. The sciences had to study the facts and regularities of nature and formulate them as descriptive laws, and not, as Planck had ...”