“... a pantomime dragon and Siegfried squeezed Brynhilde’s breasts while warbling ‘Das ist kein Mann.’ Yet his outrage at Wagner’s irreverence was overblown (after all, he named the topiary dragon in his Kelmscott garden Fafnir). Wagner and Morris both cast their Volsung heroes as slayers of a sick bourgeoisie. Sigurd is the ‘Wild-thing ...”

“... story of Mrs Heidegger turning a visitor away from the door with the excuse: ‘Jetzt denkt mein Mann.’ ‘My husband is thinking now.’) Clearly, their lives together weren’t easy. She married a wounded man desperate to purge himself of his trauma; he needed to talk; she listened; she got him through it all. Then came almost thirty years in which he ...”

“... of Moscow’s sphere of influence. The Africa-America Institute, for example, which sent Horace Mann Bond (president of Nkrumah’s alma mater, Lincoln University) to the conference, was a CIA front.The USSR was entering a period of renewed enthusiasm for the Third World. The break with Stalinism that was marked by Khrushchev’s secret speech at the 20th ...”

“... produced unpredictable surges that were seen in every insurgent city. ‘Fear,’ wrote Emile Thomas, the architect of the National Workshops in Paris and later a zealous Bonapartist, ‘has been the presiding emotion of our revolution.’Liberal leaders feared they might be unable to control the social energies released by the revolution. People of ...”

“... in March he went on to Coleridge, Chaucer, Fielding and Petronius, and then had a go at Proust, Mann, Boswell and David Hume. He took a turn through French literature then doubled back to the English Romantics. He read Cicero and Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and ...”

“... Nor even that he despised parliamentary politics. After all, the generation before his – Proust, Mann, Joyce, Lawrence, Yeats, Shaw and T.S. Eliot – despised democracy. Nor was Catholicism the mark of a deviant at a time when Belloc urged with some success that it was fashionable to convert to Rome. What made Waugh a deviant was not that he became a ...”

“... symbol to Adorno was the figure of the ageing, deaf and isolated composer that it turns up in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus – Adorno gave Mann a great deal of help with the novel – in the form of a lecture on Beethoven’s final period given by Adrian Leverkühn’s composition teacher, Wendell ...”

“... by missionary societies such as the American Enterprise Institute and evangelical tracts such as Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree (2000), this religion has led to what Amy Chua has depicted as a ‘World on Fire’ in her book of that title.* She is concerned primarily with the outer reaches of the conflagration, in South-East Asia and ...”

“... mistake lay in the expectation.Douglas hired Kubrick again three years later to replace Anthony Mann as the director of Spartacus. This was a risky opportunity; but in 1960 success with a Roman epic could be trusted to make a director’s commercial reputation. An iron law of the genre was that Jesus must be in the movie somewhere. Spartacus dodged that ...”

“... which, indeed, seems advancing towards us with a frightful, slow, unswerving consistency,’ Thomas Carlyle wrote as the disease entered Britain through Sunderland. Eventually it killed 52,000 in Britain alone. ‘Our other plagues were home-bred, and part of ourselves,’ an anonymous English doctor wrote:We had a habit of looking on them with a fatal ...”

“... sex had – has – always been shadowed by threat, by violence, by shame and by death. In 1823 Thomas Buttle was indicted for ‘unlawfully receiving the naked private parts of a person in his mouth’; John Day for ‘permitting a person to handle [his] private parts naked’. In 1835 John Smith and James Pratt were spied through a keyhole having sex in a ...”