“... 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 ...”

“... 2012 Olympics. Is New York in denial or is it simply entering another stage of what the historian Max Page sees as a continuous process of creative destruction, refusing to let any obstacle block its path? Thomas Bender and Mike Davis are two of America’s leading urban scholars. Bender is a cultural historian known for his accounts of the intellectual and ...”

“... in the other direction, subsuming the Enlightenment into even larger, sweeping historical shifts. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s notorious (and notoriously abstruse) Dialectic of Enlightenment traced ‘Enlightenment’ thinking back to the age of Homer. Foucault recast 18th-century Europe as the scene of a dramatic break in Western habits of ...”

“... York after a gay boyfriend and some depth, ending up in the Communist Party with her autodidact black lover (‘It was the summer of 1948, the summer of the presidential campaign, the summer, also, of Alger Hiss’). In dowdy disguise on the run from HUAC, she almost can’t try on a pair of ‘dust-grey suede’ shoes because they might not have been made ...”

“... insects swarm the vehicle. He has found what he was looking for. It is Clifford Brown and Max Roach. It is 1954 in Los Angeles. With Harold Land on tenor and Bud’s younger brother Richie Powell playing piano, George Morrow on bass, they are playing ‘Daahoud’, and playing it as well as it can possibly be played. The Maestro takes a deep ...”

“... the vast riches of the American and Canadian Great Plains, the Argentinian pampas or the Russian Black Earth regions. Falling prices in industries with heavy fixed investment (railways, steel plants, iron foundries and the like) raised the cost of the interest they paid to investors and banks at the very moment revenues fell below marginal costs and ...”

“... The Zionists took up the story about the physically weak body of the Jew, but they had a solution. Max Nordau, co-founder of the World Zionist Organisation with Theodor Herzl, had also studied with Charcot in his youth. Zer-Zion says: ‘He accepted the assumption that Jews suffered from orthopedic and psychological problems that prevented them from becoming ...”

“... the task of an acknowledgment page. A note had better be a note – that is, a paragraph or two, max. And contain information – several facts per sentence – that may be ‘tucked away’. Any one of these otherwise innocent textual members may be misused: for instance, when E.E. Cummings bestows a dedication on all the publishers who have rejected his ...”

“... he rescued from the ruins of his father’s synagogue: Wail, holy and glorious Torah, and put on black raiment, for the expounders of your lucid words perished in the flames. For three months the conflagration spread through the holy congregations of the exile of Israel in Sepharad. The fate of Sodom and Gomorrah overtook the holy communities … The ...”

“... The Shocks in the Kinsey Report’; ‘Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Black Man?’; ‘Has the Bust Had It?’; ‘37 Film Stars Named in Errol Flynn Confession’. During the First World War, the Daily Mirror campaigned for greater public information and education on sexual matters. It was delighted to carry government health ...”

“... a garret, many of them might as well have done. In the 1890s, when the ‘new woman’ sprang, as Max Beerbohm put it, ‘fully armed from Ibsen’s brain’, their cases tended to follow a pattern. Attracted by the idea of freedom from social and sexual convention and the chance to live among artists, even to be artists, they found themselves not in a new ...”