“... 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 ...”

“... nothing like the analysis that is available for the nature and history of beauty. An exception is Karl Rosenkrantz’s The Aesthetics of Ugliness (1853), but he takes the idea far away from opposition to mere beauty: ‘Flatulence is an ugly business in all circumstances. But since it is a sign that the liberty of man is not always entirely under his control ...”

“... writer without being truly part of his or her work. Not every text which bears the signature of Karl Marx is necessarily ‘Marxist’. There is a difference between what Middlemarch is seeking to do at any particular point, and what George Eliot had in mind at the time, if she had anything particular in mind at all. The literary intentions that matter are ...”

“... the interconnections between base and superstructure behind the historical materialism of Karl Marx. For Debray, the goal is to dissolve the conventional barriers separating culture from technology, to think of them not as irrevocable antagonists, but ‘one by the other, one with the other’. One consequence of deliberately interlacing cultural ...”

“... and, if you can’t, you can have a bit of it, just a little of what you fancy. ‘Everyone,’ Karl Lagerfeld says, ‘can afford a luxury handbag.’ Or, as Miuccia Prada translates: ‘It’s so easy to make money. The bag is the miracle of the company.’ ‘Everybody – everybody – is talking about handbags with the intensity of cardinals appointing ...”

“... against humanity. After Waterloo, nobody had even mooted a trial of Napoleon, save possibly by a French court for treason, making exile by decree of the victorious powers a simple and effective solution. At the end of the Second World War the Nuremberg international military tribunal would establish the existence of crimes against humanity and the crime of ...”

“... criminal prosecutions of leading Nazis at the end of the Second World War raised the question, for Karl Jaspers among others, of the need for a wider recognition of German guilt. The complicity of the majority population must be acknowledged; monetary compensation from one state to another would not suffice. Hannah Arendt resisted the notion of collective ...”

“... under the instructions of their religious leaders. As with other major revolutions, including the French and Russian, to which this political earthquake can justly be compared, the new group which inherited power was virtually unknown outside the country. Who, before 1978, had heard of the Ayatollah Khomeini – or even knew what an ayatollah was? But more ...”

“... Dollfuss moved against the socialists, putting down a fitful uprising of workers in Linz, shelling Karl Marx Hof in Vienna, expelling the Social Democrats from parliament and passing a new corporatist constitution. He was assassinated in an attempted Nazi coup in July. That same year Mises left for Geneva. The Austrians had strong links with organisations in ...”

“... final decision not to emigrate to Palestine (see letter to Scholem of 20 January 1930, written in French and translated into English without comment in the present edition) seems to have been as much as anything else the result of laziness (in learning Hebrew), incompetence (in sorting out his divorce) and sheer lack of ideological commitment. The present ...”

“... Kenneth Silver and Romi Golan, for example – have recently argued that, on the contrary, French art in the Twenties and Thirties was far more conservative than Modernist. Winter writes in this revisionist tradition but attacks on a broader front. He has devoted a scholarly lifetime to the study of the Great War and is now its leading Anglo-American ...”

“... some good jokes (‘Castroenteritis’, ‘Birth of a Notion’), feeble and repetitious jokes (Karl = Groucho), and jokes that resist exegesis to the last. I looked up this bit in the Mexican edition, only to find that it had been specially added for the British reader: ‘After many a moon José Hernández ... killed himself by bullfighting with a bus on ...”

“... two streams coming together (both were frozen over) and, no less strange, myself calling out in French across that forest- clearing ... Yet this kind of Romantic self-release can only be suicidal to a wised-up, historical awareness like Muldoon’s. Neither General Jeffrey Amherst nor Colonel Henry Bouquet can stomach the willow-tobacco the Indians ...”

“... helplessly into a war’. ‘If they think we are going to lift the weapons of murder against our French and other brethren,’ she is reported to have said, ‘then we shall shout: “We will not do it.” ’ In this context, Luxemburg’s celebrated theory of the ‘Mass Strike’ must be understood as a strategy for paralysing the state at the moment of ...”

“... precocious. Bored at school, he read what you would expect a clever young man to read – the French symbolist poets, Stefan George, Rilke, Wedekind, Nietzsche – but he was also interested in street cries and fairground songs, whose rhythms found their way into his earliest ballads. When war broke out he was attracted by the idea of heroic ...”