“... and its real ability to alter them.’ Storia Notturna is still dedicated, in the spirit of Walter Benjamin, to the history of the vanquished. But now the accent is on the simple perdurance of popular beliefs, across any number of social structures and through every kind of historical and civilisational change: they are anchored in the operations ...”

“... the portrayal of a bourgeois society at its height, Fortunata and Jacinta sometimes brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s ‘Arcades’ study, which traces the interconnections of the manifold social and cultural innovations of Second Empire Paris. Both Galdos and Benjamin produce a composite portrait of the experience of ...”

“... And Marlowe is quicker with jokes about ‘The Killers’ and ‘Prufrock’ and lines from Walter Bagehot and Suetonius than a truly plain-speaking private dick ought to be. When the drunken novelist tells him that good stuff is written fast, and that claims to the contrary are ‘a lot of mish-mash’, he says: ‘It didn’t come easy to ...”

“... scene came to pay homage to the widow of the composer Gustav Mahler and the writer Franz Werfel, Walter Gropius’s divorced wife and Oscar Kokoshka’s former lover. Thomas Mann, who was one of the guests, offered ‘cordial felicitations on your special day’. Some of Mann’s friends were astonished that he could maintain his friendship with Alma when he ...”

“... their own dignity and secure their own liberty. But as one of the leading historians of slavery, Walter Johnson, recently observed, much of the newer scholarship has been incorporated into the triumphalist narrative. The reductio ad absurdum of this process was George W. Bush’s speech in the summer of 2003, on Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal – a ...”

“... private are piled promiscuously on any campus counter at the start of every term. Goffman is now Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, a far cry from that hotel in the Shetlands where, back in the days of rationing, he did his first fieldwork. Actually, anywhere would be a far cry from that hotel and not ...”

“... A family on the throne,’ observed Walter Bagehot, in one of those honeyed phrases which may mean more or less than they seem to, ‘is an interesting idea.’ Indeed, it is. But during the past two hundred years of British royal history, it is an idea which has embodied itself in two very different human forms ...”

“... modern world. Why should peers and baronets be prominent in the British elite of 2024? Take Sir (Walter) John Scott, 5th baronet, countryside campaigner and snuff manufacturer (‘chairman of Sir Walter Scott’s Fine Border Snuff, 2012-, chairman of North Pennine Hunt 2008-’). Google suggests that Sir John is a rather ...”

“... Yes, yes, Mr Burne-Jones,’ Benjamin Jowett is reputed to have said as he inspected the artist’s newly completed Arthurian murals in the Oxford Union, ‘but what does one do with the Grail once one has found it?’ This sounds almost as much the definitive question as the Grail was the definitive quest, but Jowett’s objection is more radically misconceived than any answer could be ...”

“... idea of the lifetime’s project. In the last piece collected here, ‘Imaging’, Keiller quotes Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Surrealism’, dwelling in particular on his description of Breton and Nadja as ‘the lovers who convert everything we have experienced on mournful railway journeys (railways are beginning to age), on godforsaken Sunday ...”

“... tiresome adherence to the ‘correspondence theory of truth’, and directed them to Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Excavation and Memory’, where Benjamin argues that genuine memory yields an image of the person who remembers rather than simply cataloguing events.It’s true that the protocols of Anglo ...”

“... and a burglar, Thomas Mason (‘alias Humming Tom’), who had broken into the house of Sir Walter Cope. There was the woman from Finsbury accused of ‘cozening Elizabeth Barnes of certain money for a little powder in a paper’: she had promised that Elizabeth ‘should have her purpose of musicon by carryenge the powder about her’, apparently ...”

“... Life of Dickens’s Ellen Ternan, or the now-forgotten but interesting Portrait of Zélide (Benjamin Constant’s mistress, Mme de Charrière) by Wharton’s friend Geoffrey Scott – Mainwaring’s Mysteries is the product of long and deep digging in all kinds of likely and unlikely places. And in this dogged quest, she has been driven by motives quite ...”

“... passed ... in a dizzying but pleasurable succession of meetings with his circle of intimates – Walter Berry, Paul Bourget, Abbé Mugnier, Ralph and Lisa Curtis, Madame de Cossé-Brissac, Rosa Fitz-James (“the best hostess I have ever known”), and Philomène de Lévis-Mirepoix – all members of the fashionable upper crust of cosmopolitan Paris.’ Was ...”

“... shed, but he opposed the efforts of Oxford’s rising liberals to tidy up Christianity. He found Benjamin Jowett’s Hegelised Plato a poor substitute for St Paul and skipped Matthew Arnold’s poetry lectures because they clashed with cricket matches. All the same, he thrived. He won a fellowship at Merton. He translated French roundelays and befriended ...”