“... to advice that asserted the centrality of line. His Danish father made a living producing black and white illustrations for a German magazine (Sickert’s mother was English, and the family moved to England from Munich in 1868, when Sickert was eight). He already shared Degas’s admiration for Charles Keene, an illustrator for Punch whom he later ...”

“... France had moved on, but Modiano, the son of a Jewish businessman who had made his living on the black market during the Occupation and a Flemish actress who worked in the Nazi film industry, could not. He was so consumed by the history of Occupied Paris, the city where his parents had met, that he felt as if he had memories of it, although he was born in ...”

“... of Klava reminded me of Einstein’s heartless references to his wife in his correspondence with Max Born. After Klava’s death he gave all the money he had won from various prizes – 139,000 roubles – to charity, without a thought that his children might need it, like Leo Tolstoy, who made over the royalties from his books to charity and left his family ...”

“... talks about his boyhood in France in the 1930s: ‘The return to savagery – to the Minotaur, for Max Ernst, to Picasso’s paganism – I still see these today as the atrocious forces unleashed on society during that era … my generation still sees Guernica falling on painting … the way the Nazi planes bombarded the town.’ Latour, slightly ...”

“... Carrington’s mother sent her a copy of Herbert Read’s Surrealism. The picture on the cover was Max Ernst’s Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, which shows three female figures: one lying on the ground, fainted or dead; the second fleeing towards the left of the frame; the third slumped in the arms of a male figure. ‘I thought, ah, this is ...”

“... meant making an accommodation with a just as fervently anti-communist Federal Republic. He and Max Horkheimer had already censored themselves in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), using carefully coded terms for class struggle and capitalism; subsequently Adorno took his name off the (excellent) book he had written with Eisler on cinema music, Composing ...”

“... with Hardy, his second wife, Florence, and the prince sitting awkwardly in the garden at Max Gate, on wicker seats. Florence looks almost asthmatically taut with terror, but Hardy, the only one not looking at the camera, is serenely sunk in himself. The prince confessed that he had not read a word by his host. But what could that matter, really, to ...”

“... a man called Peters: Getting on three months ago, I posted my passport to you via your publisher Max Reinhardt, for safe-keeping. As this was from Volos in Greece, and furthermore the envelope did not carry a stamp, there existed the possibility that you know nothing about it, and this is all new to you. It was a British, full ten-year passport. If otherwise ...”

“... freedom. If history is at an end, then so are we. It is at this point that Fukuyama makes use of Max Weber, and his deep historical pessimism. History is at an end in a radical disenchantment of human purposes. Fukuyama has committed a similar error to Hegel’s and Marx’s. He has identified history with fundamental contradictions. History can only ...”

“... leads, with the advent of the Protestant ethic and capitalism (Bataille acknowledges his debt to Max Weber in an appendix which also cites his other sources and affinities), to the undisputed reign, in modern Western societies, of the ‘sovereignty of servitude’. The search for a lost intimacy, then, is a search for at least a momentary escape from the ...”

“... the extraordinary role of Confucianism in Korea, and engaging (briefly) with the theses of Max Weber on religion and economic development, the book allows a general reader a way into some of the issues relating to South Korea’s spectacular modernisation since the early Sixties. It is extremely fair on the strengths and weaknesses of the various ...”

“... This was nothing to do with any ideological commitment to classlessness. In a clip from an old black-and-white tape, Green firmly corrects the interviewer’s attempt to place him in the middle class: ‘You mustn’t say that, my mother would never forgive you. I am an aristocrat.’ It’s said laughingly, however, without any suggestion of hauteur. His ...”

“... cures: swallowing spiders and white worms (Itelman and Yakut, for sterility); the fat of the black beetle (Ossetians, for rabies); crushed cockroach, hen’s gall (Russians of Surgut, for abscesses and hernias); macerated red worms (Yakut, for rheumatism); pike’s gall (Buryat, for eye ailments) … stroking with a woodpecker’s beak or blood, nasal ...”

“... thousand or so papers had been closed down or merged by 1936, when the Reich Leader of the Press, Max Amann, declared: ‘We have freed the newspapers from all ties, particularly personal ties that hindered or might hinder the accomplishment of their National Socialist tasks.’ Meanwhile, Goebbels issued instructions to the papers every day, outlining what ...”