“... 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 ...”

“... own accounts of events, and gives several if no single one can be authenticated. He clearly knows French well, but for excerpted French conversation and commentary he does his own translations, and these reveal inelegances in his English even more than does the body of the text. ‘You’ll end up in the dumps,’ someone ...”

“... people would have spoken both Latin and proto-Welsh – rather like Tolstoyan aristos speaking French and Russian. As the fourth century wore on, Roman-occupied Britain was hit by a string of attacks from the other side of Hadrian’s Wall, with Picts and Scots increasingly working in conjunction with Saxon and Frankish sea-raiders. The attacks came (and ...”

“... mirrors that cultural shift by privileging performances by Brüggen, Gardiner and Pinnock over Karl Böhm, George Szell and Eugen Jochum, pillars of the Austro-German tradition whose interpretations are now discreetly tucked away as ‘supplementary’ performances, historical oddities. Böhm never gets the notes wrong, but his orchestral plod suffocates ...”

“... of rescue, and pansexual before that term was in use. (He sometimes slept with his friend, the French actor Christian Marquand.) Mann uses that New School punch-up to explore Brando’s unceasing sexual adventurism, and his habit of seeking parental figures and then abandoning them. There was a natural promiscuity to him, like an actor who wondered if he ...”

“... enhanced in Russia by an incomprehension that was sometimes literal: young nobles often learned French first and spoke Russian only with difficulty.By the 19th century, however, educated elites all over Europe were drawn, whether by poetry, paintings or music, towards a romantic notion of the rural poor. The beginnings of capitalist industrialisation and ...”

“... in Alsace was found with ease by journalists, but who remained ‘introuvable’ by the French Police. Is it conceivable that this was because the witness might have disproved the involvement of Barbie in the most heinous crime of which he was accused, the only one that clearly came under the heading of a ‘crime against humanity’, which, since ...”

“... in July 1947, Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, walked out of discussions with his British and French counterparts about the American offer of Marshall Aid; Europe was divided, east and west; and the seven surviving major Nazi war criminals who had been tried and condemned by the victorious allies at Nuremberg were moved, the subject of a special ...”

“... Johnson’s veneration started a fashion which lasted long after Burke’s death. By 1856, Karl Marx, who himself denounced Burke as a sycophant and ‘out-and-out vulgar bourgeois’, was also telling the readers of the New York Daily Tribune that he was ‘the man who is held by every party in England as the paragon of British statesmen’. Burke was ...”

“... central Berlin to the headquarters of the German Communist Party (KPD). When they arrived at Karl Liebknecht Haus, on the Bülowplatz, the temperature was –18°C. They shuffled and waited in the bone-numbing cold for four hours to hear the podium speeches of the party cadres. As Hobsbawm would recall much later, there was singing – ‘The ...”

“... thus takes the story quickly from magic and mystery to the early 20th-century achievements of Karl Landsteiner, who identified the ABO blood groups; Richard Lewisohn, who discovered that sodium citrate would keep blood from coagulating; and Alexis Carrel, whose brilliant suturing of a father’s artery to the tiny, delicate vein of his infant daughter’s ...”

“... most early German commentators. Kant insisted on the importance of retributive justice; even Karl Ferdinand Hommel, the ‘German Beccaria’, parted from his mentor over the death penalty. But abolitionist sentiment grew in the first half of the 19th century. Capital punishment offended liberal belief in the moral rehabilitation of the offender, and the ...”

“... to make that range of reference credible: she did two years in college, specialising in modern French philosophy, though ‘all I remember now is essence procedes existence or is it the other way around?’) The novel is full of these moments of translation, which often work to broaden the humour that is always latent in Updike’s prose – the sly ...”

“... All I can say is: “Vive la république!” ’ say the double-chinned dinner-jacketed slobs in Karl Arnold’s caricature, while Toller, ignored by director and designer, stares out sadly from the photograph on the opposite page. Jürgen Schebera has already published a brilliantly-illustrated short biography of Kurt Weill, and one can only gape at his ...”

“... motley mahogany: yes, I remember it well) to hold it to her lovely earlobe and rolled it between French finger and thin thumb to listen better to – to what for heaven’s sake? Tobacco termites working nights Chez Maxim? The sound of a cigar being gently crushed to pieces by a feminine hand? (In the trade this is called ‘listening to the ...”