“... They were collected in the mid-1960s as Len Deighton’s Action Cook Book and Où est le garlic? French Cooking in Fifty Lessons. By that point Deighton was rich and famous, thanks to the runaway success of his early novels – The Ipcress File (1962), Horse under Water (1963), Funeral in Berlin (1964) and Billion-Dollar Brain (1966) – and the movie ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... dialogue; and to drain some of the schematic grand guignol out of them. Of course he failed the Karl Kraus test – who didn’t? Kraus quotes some yea-sayer to the effect that Zweig with his novellas had conquered all the languages of the world, and adds two words of his own: ‘except one’. The story went the rounds that Zweig had his manuscripts ...”

“... the specific case of psychoanalysis, whether it deserves the status, as Freud thought it did and Karl Popper thought it absolutely did not, of a science. But insofar as a philosopher, or anyone, is interested in politics – interested, that is, not just in describing the world but changing it – the real question is whether psychoanalysis can liberate ...”

“... were scores and scores of cars there and hundreds and hundreds of spectators both English and French. Everyone was talking and chatting, when slowly came into sight the first tank I ever saw. Not a monster, but a very graceful machine, with beautiful lines, lozenge-shaped, but with two clumsy-looking wheels behind it. (These wheels were to be phased out ...”

“... The German public’s eagerness to infer from the military victory over France a victory over French culture, Nietzsche writes, is a pernicious delusion, ‘not simply because it is a delusion – after all, mistakes can be most salutary and productive – but because it can transform our victory into total defeat: the defeat, if not the extirpation, of ...”

“... the two books, and each of them is told in the first person. Moravia’s Edoardo is a professor of French in Rome, Updike’s Roger a professor of theology at an East Coast university in a city that has marked resemblances to Boston (it has, for example, a Christian Science cathedral). But these are parallels between books which are in manner as different as ...”

“... communities than to undiluted democratic majorities – originated in the pre-1914 writings of Karl Renner and other Austro-Hungarian liberals who were anxious to design solutions to the nationalities problem that would somehow keep the Empire in one piece. Born in failure, the consociational idea remains alive because the problems presented by plural ...”

“... others) call the hypothetico-deductive philosophy of science. His main source for it is Sir Karl Popper. Medawar is well-known as Popper’s leading disciple; his superlatives have even been emblazoned on the cover of Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery to lubricate the sales of that work. But Popper himself is not the subject of an ...”

“... Unless, therefore, they opt for a fideist espousal of the beliefs of Jesus or Karl Marx, the hardest task for any writer in Dr Thomas’s series will be to muster the personal (the literary or intellectual) force to lend authority to the perspective which they adopt towards their subjects. Much the most impressive essay in this vein is Dr ...”

“... visiting from out of town. Meanwhile, Mahler books are piling up. Henry-Louis de La Grange, a French baron with a Mahler fetish, has issued Volume III of his four-volume biography, covering the period from August 1904 to December 1907. The tome, a thousand pages long, moves at the geological speed of one page a day. Donald Mitchell, the author of three ...”

“... that this doesn’t even rate a mention; it’s not his form of nostalgia. Stalinallee (now Karl-Marx-Allee) in Berlin is more in his line, a monster that can inspire admiration and disapproval at the same time. Hatherley nails it as ‘by its very existence an indictment of the vainglory, hypocrisy and dubious claims to “socialism” of the ...”

“... but emblematic presence is maintained by his supporters. While I was there earlier this month a French woman was squatting on the pavement, hunched over a placard, shading in the letters of a message that she later tied to one of the crowd barriers. It read, very roughly: Thank you, Assange, for giving us a history of the vanquished. She was thinking of ...”

“... contained dangerous pages. Not surprisingly, therefore, a number of bishops in the days of the French Revolution were happy for even the Bible to remain out of bounds to the poor, fearing that to teach them to read would be like giving them guns. The bishops were instrumental in defeating, in the House of Lords, Samuel Whitbread’s 1807 bill, which sought ...”

“... because we live in the 20th century.’ The entire continent was fired by a combination of Karl Marx, the Declaration of Independence and Walt Whitman, but Guatemala burned the brightest. There, a decades-long struggle to break the back of the coffee aristocracy culminated in the 1950 election of Arbenz, who with the help of a small circle of Communist ...”