“... the empire. Until the war began, tolerance and compromise kept many of those visions on hold. In Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930), set in Vienna just before the war and a monument to the Habsburg polity, Ulrich, the protagonist, has been ‘accustomed his whole life long to expect politics to bring about not what needed to happen, but rather ...”

“... the beginning of its economic and cultural decline. In Heliopolis, a new film by Ahmed Abdallah, a young man doing research on ‘minorities’ in pre-revolutionary Egypt befriends an elderly Jewish woman; in a striking documentary sequence, a group of old people fondly remember a time when local shops were run by Jews and Greeks. If Egyptians long for an ...”

“... of the sheer demographic magnitude of a struggle that brought together hundreds of thousands of young men, from scattered and often isolated places, and exposed them to new pathogens, poor food, harsh weather and concentrated filth. Non-battle deaths are also a consequence of race and of racism. The 180,000 black men who fought for the Union were more ...”

“... of her. The recording comes from a film called Broadway Melody of 1938 in which Garland stars with Robert Taylor and Eleanor Powell. It was her first feature-length film for MGM. She had performed the song earlier that year at Gable’s on-set birthday celebrations: he was the studio’s biggest star. Garland made a surprise appearance at the party, posing as ...”

“... against aspiring newcomers. The musical Hamilton exalts a classic New York story of a brilliant young immigrant rising in a mercantile culture. (‘I hear it’s highly overrated,’ President-elect Trump tweeted last November after the cast addressed Vice President-elect Mike Pence, as he was leaving the theatre, calling on the new administration ‘to ...”

“... is now. Photographs were key, and Acker photographed brilliantly, especially in the shots taken by Robert Mapplethorpe: that soft, white face, with big, round eyes in the cheeks of a chubby cherub; that soft, white skin, pierced and pinched and hyperextended with hooks and rings and belts and dumb-bells: Acker was lifting weights long before lifting weights ...”

“... a small horde of Belle Epoque celebrities – everybody from Pierre Louÿs, Mata Hari and Comte Robert de Montesquiou, to Gide, Colette, Rémy de Gourmont, Paul Valéry, Sacha Guitry, Salomon Reinach and the buxom brunette diva Emma Calvé. (It was de Gourmont who nicknamed Barney ‘L’Amazone’, the monicker under which she would publish three books of ...”

“... and, as Taoiseach, he decided to make public money available for this. The project was taken on by Robert Dudley Edwards from University College Dublin, who promised that a book, one thousand pages long, made up of essays by various experts, would be in print by 1946. The Government released a grant of £1500. Over the next few years Edwards worked with a ...”

“... suffer the loss they were afraid of, yes,Holders of one position, wrong for years.This has the young Auden’s typical combination of doomwatch and kicking energy. The voice of the inevitable is speaking, the voice of evolutionary force, the voice of what he would eventually and notoriously, in the last stanza of ‘Spain’, call History. So it is proper ...”

“... 12 February. A shoddy programme about the conviction of Jonathan King for offences against young men dating back twenty-five years and more. While it features some of the police involved, it manages not to ask the pertinent question: if these 15-year-old boys had been 15-year-old girls and romping round in Rolls-Royces even more famous than those of ...”

“... own incarceration within the English Tripos. Abandoning the task in despair at two in the morning, young Ted goes to bed and dreams that he is visited by a strange figure, half-man and half-fox, ‘just now stepped out of a furnace’ and in terrible agony from the burns that cover its body from head to foot. This enigmatic creature moves towards the desk and ...”

“... at the tomb. I said: “Look. There is something going on.” There were Christians, Muslims, young and old, rich and poor. For the first time, you saw people from all parts of Lebanon praying together. At the same time, a journalist called to say the mukhabarrat’ – the intelligence services – ‘were putting pressure on the television not to show ...”

“... leaders’ aims. It would have shrugged off the emigration of a few hundred thousand disaffected young people, and the deaths and maiming of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Russians, as the necessary price of success. It would have brutally and successfully shown its power to crush what little internal opposition remains. It would have exposed the ...”

“... scope, even though the women of the country had softened in their attitudes, persuaded by handsome young soldiers less grim of demeanour than their compatriots, and having miraculous access, in this embattled mid-Atlantic island, to ample stocks of liquor and gramophone records. Iceland had its own hit parade, not corresponding to those of the homelands. An ...”

“... included paintings by Ernst and poems by the American Modernist Hart Crane, the French Surrealists Robert Desnos and Philippe Soupault and the German Expressionist Georg Trakl (in translations from French and German by Eugene Jolas). A decade later, the last issue was still churning out Work in Progress, now alongside work by Hans Arp, Beckett, Breton, Kafka ...”