“... as a sort of miracle, attributable to the personalities of such men as Lucien Febvre, Braudel, Ernest Labrousse, history and the social sciences have developed in close symbiosis since 1933-45. Historians like Febvre, Braudel, Jacques Le Goff and François Furet have presided successively over the École Pratique des Hautes Études (now the École des ...”

“... way of life which, even as described in his own anthology, seems relatively unappealing. Whatever may be said in favour of the country house as a mode of government, way of life, shrine of culture or architectural artifact, there is clearly much to be said against it too, in part because so many country-house owners seem to have been so peculiarly insensitive ...”

“... Sherston to himself. He now accepts that it is not necessary to approve of tactics which he may simply not understand, and after a brief spell in the pavilion – ‘retired hurt’ – he plays on until the match is over, wicket intact. For all the possible irony of its title, Sherston’s Progress finally endorses Pilgrim’s journey towards the ...”

“... and art, according to Nietzsche, is the best veil (‘We have art,’ he remarked, ‘that we may not perish of the truth’). Fundamentally we are disgusted by life, and we are paralysed by this disgust when and if we acknowledge it. What Nietzsche calls the Dionysian, Critchley and Webster usefully suggest, is ‘the introduction of a kind of lethargy ...”

“... on his musical language, and more far-reaching effects on his forms. The effect of Beethoven may have declined in the 1850s, the period of The Trojans, but Gluck re-emerges as a first and last love; Berlioz supervised his works in performance and inspired the superb editions of the 1870s. Still in Chapter 13, I am unconvinced by Cairns’s aesthetic ...”

“... enough to have read all the biographies of Wilson (Leslie Smith, Dudley Smith, Gerard Noel, Ernest Kay and others even worse) there is really nothing new here. It is the same old story of the young Boy Scout, Nonconformist and Liberal. He says he joined the Oxford University Labour Party (though not the Labour Club) in time for the famous 1939 ...”

“... in America had generally forsaken. The results have been prodigious. The works of Perry Anderson, Ernest Gellner, Anthony Giddens, Geoffrey Hawthorn, Steven Lukes, Michael Mann and Runciman himself, not to mention many others, take up the challenge of the classical sociologists, often on the terrain of world history. Runciman’s own response to the question ...”

“... the first disowned American hero to find this out, on the rolling slopes of the Little Big Horn. Ernest Hemingway abandoned Africa to scatter his fame across Idaho with a shotgun. Richard Brautigan fled Haight-Ashbury for the solitude of Montana to write Trout Fishing in America and other then classics now discarded. Few make the arduous journey to these ...”

“... The librarian owner of this nose lives doubly in texts: among his shelves and, fleetingly, in Ernest Jones’s biography, where he appears as the ‘cretinous dwarf’ who may have saved Freud’s life after an operation. Little Goethe, intellectual giant and homunculus, world-beater and world-renouncer, author of ‘my ...”

“... were as sound as a Bow bell. He could not find it in himself to dislike the upper classes: ‘They may be an abuse, but they are often as like as not intelligent and amusing.’ But he couldn’t stand the middle classes. This clarity of definition surrounds the man and his policies, as well as the challenges which faced him, and the West, at the time. Imagine ...”

“... cross-dressing women’s fashion designer who had picked up a coke habit in New York’; Captain Ernest Schiff, ‘a man-about-town with a suspiciously German surname and a Teutonic habit of filing his fingernails to a point’; Antonio Gandarillas, ‘the opium-addicted bisexual aristocrat’; Brilliant Chang, ‘the emblematic Dope King and white ...”

“... to Hitler and Mussolini. Unfortunately, his pacifism converted no one. Indeed, so incensed was Ernest Bevin of the TUC that he mobilised the Party Conference of 1935 against Lansbury, famously denouncing him for ‘hawking [his] conscience’ all around. Lansbury resigned the leadership the following year, although he remained a shuttle pacifist. Several ...”

“... Korea Daily News and the Korean Taehan Maeil Sinbo, were owned by a British businessman called Ernest Bethell, which made them untouchable without British co-operation. The Korean paper, in particular, was widely read because it was not censored, unlike the rest of the press. The Japanese argued that Bethell and other British journalists were providing ...”

“... Organisation of Apocryphal Power, run by a fiendish translator named Ermes Marana, whose purpose may or may not be the subversion of fiction itself. The OAP is vaguely reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon’s underground postal service, the Tristero System, and almost certainly has covert links with Buñuel’s Revolutionary Army ...”

“... reminiscent of the linguistic relativism of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Other remarks on language recall Ernest Fenollosa, who presented Chinese as an inherently more natural language than English, though Chase (whose influence in Boston would have been of the kind to have interested the young Fenollosa in the Orient) seems more of a relativist. Knowledge of other ...”