“... and that all others are aberrations. It also stems directly or indirectly from our commitment to Max Weber and his belief in the inevitable disenchantment of the world as a result of capitalist modernisation. Over the past generation, formerly conservative countries such as Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece have all been profoundly transformed, and in all ...”

“... processes of ‘savage’ peoples. Such speculations contradicted the theories of Friedrich Max Müller, the comparative philologist who then dominated Oxford. Müller argued that mythology originated in the spiritual insights of the Aryans of ancient India. Over time their grand words for high thoughts were distorted into the names of divine ...”

“... war’s first casualty. Before the First World War, the Greenwich Village rebels Randolph Bourne, Max Eastman and John Reed regarded themselves as nationalistic liberators willing to draw on the country’s intellectual traditions. Eastman defined himself as an ‘American lyrical socialist – a child of Walt Whitman reared by Karl Marx’. But with ...”

“... by an urban expressway and redevelopment – which perhaps had some claim to be Moscow’s Soho. Max Kostin, honest, decent and stupid, becomes a soldier; Yuri Sharok, the son of a tailor who clothes most of smart Moscow, guileful and deceitful, goes into the NKVD and employs as an informer the pretty and promiscuous Vika Marasevich. But though these, and ...”

“... on this stage from time to time are Thomas Hardy, visited more than once in Dorchester: Tea at Max Gate. Lady Stacie there, a descendant of R.B. Sheridan – and a fashionable lady, formerly a great beauty. She gushed to T.H. about his novels at the tea-table. He shut her up by saying ‘I am not interested in my novels. I haven’t written one for more ...”

“... prose is every bit as urgent as his poetry – it crackles like his thistles under a frosty blue-black pressure. In this type of criticism, the reading process becomes more than analogous to the act of writing: reading fuses with writing because it empathises in a dramatic manner with the critic’s struggle to express ideas, a struggle that resembles an ...”

“... went foraging for African and Native American art in the city’s antique shops with Breton, Max Ernst and Duchamp. After the war, the local variants of phenomenology and Marxism became international cults. Structuralism, which understood culture according to a linguistic model, as a system of differences and oppositions (...”

“... transalpine cabinets, colleges and salons, to Voltaire and to the Lunar Men of Birmingham and the Black Country, bore fruit. He became a celebrated physics professor at the prestigious, if troubled, Pavia University, and its rector from 1785. Evidently, these journeys and triumphs were accompanied by more fun-loving enterprises. With a mix of precision and ...”

“... not Sex and the City … That’s four gay men sitting around talking.’ Meanwhile Issa Rae, the Black creator of HBO’s Insecure (2016-21), defended Dunham against allegations of ‘hipster racism’: ‘There could be more diversity, but I think that’s the fault of [HBO], rather than Lena’s.’It’s never easy to distinguish between drama that breaks ...”

“... of that influence is not always obvious and the biographer is always liable to exaggerate it. Max Jacob, Apollinaire, the Steins – such figures live in this biography not only as very strange, strong personalities but by virtue of their beliefs and talents which Richardson vividly summarises. Jacob was Picasso’s first laureate. These two short men ...”

“... reaction against the Picturesque was one motivating factor for the Modernist garden movement. Black and white photographs enhanced the linearity of the designs and the autochrome – a technique as short-lived as the gardens them selves – threw unifying veils of pointillist colour over decorative schemes. This process set the garden and its image into ...”

“... unknown even to his students. Wilson mentions that Rutherford’s failures sometimes drove him to black despair. His 1909 model of the atom failed to explain why the electrons do not fall into the nucleus to neutralise its charge. Niels Bohr took up this problem. He combined Rutherford’s model with Planck’s quantum theory by postulating that, for reasons ...”

“... building blocks of quantum theory, that uncommonsensical account of subatomic reality devised by Max Planck at the turn of the 20th century. The theory replaced certainty with probability, a thing that Einstein could never bring himself to accept. One of the ironies of the Bergson-Einstein affair, as Canales notes, is that the world according to quantum ...”

“... by the Bolshevik and Chinese communist revolutions; and ‘pandemics’ principally by the Black Death of the 14th century. ‘State failure’ – Scheidel sometimes calls it ‘systems collapse’ – is somewhat more sketchily represented by the sudden and still mysterious disappearance in the 11th century bce of the palatial Mycenaean kingdoms of ...”

“... of the nativist gang (adorned and equipped, like their adversaries, in Braveheart meets Mad Max style), the Rabbits are outlawed and Priest’s young son, Amsterdam Vallon (soon to be Leonardo DiCaprio), is bundled off to a reformatory. In 1862, during the Civil War, the grown-up Vallon returns to the unchanged frontier town of Five Points, still run ...”