“... still see the mid-1970s Penguin collection I carried around like a talisman: parallel English and French texts, the cover Carlos Schwabe’s painting Spleen et Idéal. OK, I confess: I fell hard for the Baudelaire mythos, while never quite getting the poetry. I remember being put off by all the ‘O, muse!’ stuff, which seemed more redolent of attic tallow ...”

“... told off in oracular fashion for picking the wrong subject for a fiction. She writes a story in French, and he finds out, then proceeds to congratulate her ‘on the way in which you’ve picked up every old worn-out literary phrase that’s been lying about the streets of Paris for the last twenty years, and managed to pack them all into those few ...”

“... President Giscard d’Estaing with a dog (including teaching it to obey simple commands in French), and much about the comings and goings of Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, Roy Jenkins, Prince Charles and the like – plenty of material here for a comparative study of the discourteous and the bibulous, with suggestions of an inverse correlation ...”

“... a number of young physicists to enter the rapidly-burgeoning field of molecular biology. The French geneticist and Nobel laureate François Jacob recalled: After the war, many young physicists were disgusted by the military use that had been made of atomic energy ... Some looked to biology with a mixture of diffidence and hope ... To hear one of the ...”

“... Nietzsche he pretended to quote, who as Reich Chancellor read and reread the adventure stories of Karl May which had occupied his boyhood, who locked himself into his nightly showings of Hollywood films while Germany burned. The would-be creator and composer of Zukunftsmusik, Wagnerian music of the future, was a travesty of the romantic artist, an aesthetic ...”

“... from a metaphysic to a particular political consequence (much as people used to worry about Karl Popper’s deduction of a piecemeal liberalism from his metaphysic of provisional knowledge). The trouble with metaphysical theories is that they are utterly general, and so designed in advance to accommodate my particular cultural adaptation. Norris grants ...”

“... a Fred Karno’s army, untrained, largely unarmed, and kitted out in the horizon-blue uniforms the French had mothballed twenty years earlier. Three weeks after he joined it, Stefan’s division was chaotically dissolved with an every-man-for-himself order. He spent the next two years as itinerantly as he had spent the previous war: in hiding, on the road, in ...”

“... Irving Howe; Lionel Trilling called it ‘reserved and beautifully realised’. Six years later Karl Miller found The Widow’s Children ‘a compelling and satisfying book’. All those endorsements, however, didn’t keep her novels from going out of print at the end of the decade (they were reprinted in the 1980s, but went out of print again). Then ...”

“... after her by Kiefer. Kollwitz was the artist of poverty and oppression, and her Memorial for Karl Liebknecht, the communist leader murdered by right-wing paramilitaries in 1919, introduces us to the alternative social democratic and communist traditions in modern German history. The exhibition devotes too little space to these. Although MacGregor argues ...”

“... mania. The distinction seems first to have been insisted on by the East German psychiatrist Karl Leonhard, in his systematic nosology of 1957. And here they are in DSM-5, Schizophrenia 295.90 – but now with the addition of numerous subtypes – and Bipolar I and Bipolar II, 296.89, the latter described somewhere as ‘Bipolar lite’ (‘lite’ as in ...”

“... But he had another enthusiasm too, less commented on, and cheaper to pursue: the pulp novels of Karl May, set in the Wild West and featuring cowboys, mostly of German descent, like Old Shatterhand, whose name refers to the power of his punch, and Winnetou, a Native American who converts to Christianity. May became the centre of a literary scandal when it ...”

“... mostly came to dread or to welcome the prospect of class conflict; for Lord Salisbury or Karl Marx, the most crucial question was if and when and how these two classes would come into violent collision with one another. Yet from the perspective of most other centuries, that question would not seem particularly fresh. Classes were, after all, always ...”

“... Something​ very strange happens in the middle of The End, the sixth and last volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s titanic work of self-description. At around page 482, the book swerves away from scenes of family and social life, and plunges, like a car crashing through a safety barrier, into a prolonged reflection on Adolf Hitler ...”

“... comes to be about, it’s also the ethics of Romantic humanism, which includes the ethics of Karl Marx. The aesthetic becomes important when it isn’t simply about art. Marx’s thought concerns the material conditions that would make life for its own sake possible for whole societies, one such condition being the shortening of the working day. Marxism ...”

“... to tell a story. Not much was known about O’Brian, who was then 52 and lived in Collioure on the French part of the Mediterranean coast, just north of the border with Catalonia. He had published three gloomily introspective novels for adults, one of which had been praised by Delmore Schwartz, and he was an elegant, speedy translator, most recently of Simone ...”