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“... view, as a result of the settler-colonial project, itself saturated with violence and racism. Like Walter Benjamin, Fanon believed that for the oppressed, the ‘“state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule’, and that his revolutionary duty was to help ‘bring about a real state of emergency’. Fanon’s clinical work ...”

“... persistent. Scholarship could, after all, only take her so far. It gave her a certain status – Benjamin Jowett, another early patron, used to introduce her as a ‘very clever’ young woman. But there was no prospect, as Mary very well knew, of winning an Oxford fellowship. A Victorian woman could not be a don. She might, however, even if she were an ...”

“... those flames ... the idol of Nazi arsonists and murderers’) the charge is the same. As Bruno Walter put it in a letter to Furtwängler in 1949: ‘The presence and activity of a musician of your standing in Germany at that time lent those terrible criminals cultural and moral credibility, or at least helped them considerably in its acquisition.’ Three ...”

“... which tends to get left out of fiction, where it would seem a bit too.... well, too unlikely. (As Walter Nash has recently remarked in these pages, fiction will always prefer a plausible impossibility to an implausible possibility.) Chatwin is committed to the anomalous and the improbable, and though his writing blends fact and fiction (‘I once made the ...”

“... it in the process. Chief among his sources were Voltaire’s L’Ingénu (or The Huron) and Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Remarks concerning the Savages of North America’. So, while Hermsprong’s ‘savage’ simplicity and mixed education might suggest a debt to Rousseau, Bage – like Voltaire – isn’t interested in a straightforward idealisation of ...”

“... shelf, sat down at the piano, opened it, and began to play. It was the ‘Good Night’ scene from Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia ... Ten years after Lenny’s visit to our home West Side Story excited the musical world ... It is interesting to note that the instrumental introduction to the balcony scene in West Side Story is based on the same four ...”

“... to revive the noblest political lineage of Europe, that of ‘Dr Johnson, Pitt the Younger, Burke, Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury’. Some other recent world-histories have taken a stand against Euro-centrism, notably William McNeill’s A World History (1971) and J.M. Roberts’s The Hutchinson History of the World (1976). In this regard, Mr Thomas is a ...”

“... resort to the bland evasions of personal taste. The problem of the Pisan Cantos is that stated in Walter Benjamin’s dictum: ‘There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ Pound’s paradise, like many utopias, is a hell for the excluded; Milton long ago raised the possibility that the songs of the ...”

“... unemployment and political instability, a generation was seeking a complete break with the past; Walter Gropius had recently founded the Bauhaus school in Weimar, a laboratory that hoped to provide an architectural blueprint for a new future. Mies – who walked out on his wife and three daughters, claiming he needed ‘freedom’ – spent time in the ...”

“... and that stretches to the writings of Elizabeth Bowen and to Peter Grimes, the opera with which Benjamin Britten returned from the States to England in 1942 – we encounter sensibilities thoroughly au fait with European modernism who nonetheless adopted the passion for the particular that is the hallmark of Romanticism. That is how Harris responds to the ...”

“... of ‘how it really was’, in von Ranke’s famous phrase, or of ‘the way it is’, as Walter Cronkite said on US television for twenty years or so, and they have to deal with their own scepticism and ours. We could start by wondering what ‘it’ was, before we even get to asking what ‘really’ means. And then there is Nietzsche’s remark ...”

“... want to lose or reduce the extravagance but can’t quite fall for it either. An example would be Walter Benjamin’s wonderful remark about missed experiences in Proust: None of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us – this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the ...”

“... out of it. Observing Kemalist cultural policies in 1936-37, Erich Auerbach wrote from Istanbul to Walter Benjamin: ‘the process is going fantastically and spookily fast: already there is hardly anyone who knows Arabic or Persian, and even Turkish texts of the past century will quickly become incomprehensible.’ Combining ‘a renunciation of all ...”

“... a political alternative. The influence of the Frankfurt group, however – Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin, Loewenthal, among others – did not break out of social and into literary thought until recently. Norris, in any case, sees that deconstruction made an impact on literary studies precisely because, unlike structuralism, it did not seek to be a ...”

“... John Robins was cursed as ‘that last great Antichrist’. One of the last to be cursed was Walter Scott. (They did blessings too.) Leadership and discipline was exerted through letters, and also through occasional face-to-face encounters with opponents. The letters were then incorporated and given a wider currency in printed pamphlets and books, which ...”