“... is still in our possession’) became a cliché of Austrian propaganda, bitterly lampooned by Karl Kraus in his play The Last Days of Mankind – the phrase repeated again and again as Austria slides into oblivion. The new states of Poland and Ukraine battled for the city in 1918, touching off a pogrom that killed more than a hundred Jews. Poland emerged ...”

“... also immensely productive for European (though not for British) cinema; the films Kafka saw were French, German, Italian and Danish. Some film historians argue that prewar European cinema, with its reliance on long takes and staging in depth, should be understood as an alternative to Hollywood’s increasingly rapid-fire cut-and-paste. It would be nice to ...”

“... were curiously slow to adopt the name. They finished a millennium later with the last emperor, Karl, having lost Austria, vainly trying to re-establish himself on the throne of Hungary, five hundred miles to the east. At the peak of the family’s territorial control in the 16th century, Charles V led a vagrant life, never establishing a fixed ...”

“... are organised differently, sometimes radically so. I would then have created a utopia. It will, as Karl Mannheim, the author of the first Ideology and Utopia, said, be ‘non-congruent’ with the world as it is, for it will depend upon the counter-factual claim that although it does not exist, and perhaps never will, if certain things were other than they are ...”

“... who loathed the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser and was enthused by the Anglo-French-Israeli assault on Egypt in 1956. As the Cold War intensified, Adenauer determined that his country needed greater sovereignty and a greater role in Western economic and security alliances; Germany’s long road west lay through Israel. West Germany moved ...”

“... V. It was a representation of a visit of Sherlock Holmes to France, and showed the attitude of the French towards his methods of deduction.’ The report passes over the play in silence, preferring the scenes from The Wind in the Willows performed by Forms I and II, to conclude with a sentence that reads like a spoof news item by Auden himself: ‘The company ...”

“... angel-demons were soon to bury classical civism deeper than Atlantis. Half a century later it was Karl Marx who pronounced the finest and most-quoted elegy on the classicist delusion, at the start of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The nightmare of dead generations weighed on living brains, he pointed out, and ensured that those ‘creating something ...”

“... subject of the Scottish psyche and culture, and the issue is dealt with from a different angle in Karl Miller’s Cockburn’s Millennium.) The sensitive Scot, this is to suggest, makes sense of the change which has occurred between himself then and himself now by assuming disruptions, dualisms. It’s not so much that childhood is lost as that it happens to ...”

“... republicanism’s loss of innocence in the face of the Terror. With the collapse of hopes in the French republic, English liberals like Browning and Clough – one might add Landor, who deserved inclusion here – looked increasingly to the Italian cause. One of Paulin’s main aims is ‘to redeem Clough from the neglect which his work has suffered’, and ...”

“... traces in the social edifice. This gap – which recalls the interval between 1789 and 1793 in the French Revolution – is the space of Lenin’s unique intervention. The fundamental lesson of revolutionary materialism is that revolution must strike twice. It is not that the first moment has the form of a revolution, with the substance having to be filled in ...”

“... had an occupant. A small, gaunt, elderly man in a jacket and open-necked shirt stood in the French window. I think I remember a look of something like panic on his face as the gaggle of 19-year-olds approached. After a brief hesitation he turned and exited rapidly through the glass doors into the garden. I watched as he walked away from the ...”

“... allegedly less addictive. Amphetamine was first brought to market in the US by Smith, Kline and French in 1934 in the form of a bronchial inhaler, Benzedrine, but its stimulant properties were soon recognised and it was made available in tablet form as a remedy for narcolepsy and a tonic against depression. As with cocaine, one of its first applications was ...”

“... and paid little attention to her actual texts. The reception of her 1992 novel Fransk åpning (‘French Opening’) illustrates the point. The novel, as I see it, is about a young woman’s depression and alienation, expressed in part through a soulless, distant sexual relationship. Hjorth called it a ‘book about pain, a serious book’, but most reviewers ...”

“... old and the nasty new. So what we get from Derrida and Foucault, and from other contemporary French writers, is not so much attempts to unmask the realities of the time as warnings to eschew ‘totalisation’ – to avoid the ‘metaphysical’ impulse to place everything within one great big ‘privileged’ ahistorical context. From this point of ...”

“... it here because it allows me to introduce an extraordinary page taken from the report that the French Jesuit Paul de Brebeuf sent in 1636 to the provincial priest of the Company on the events that took place in the Québec mission during that year. One of the priests had explained to the natives (naturally the account refers to them as sauvages) that the ...”