“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a distinction between the ‘mythic and moral symbolism’ of blood, on the one hand, and what Max Weber might have called ‘disenchanted blood’, on the other. Some of the time Starr seems to think that the more disenchanted blood is, the more it is purged of its cultural baggage, the better. To take one example, ‘mythic and moral symbolism’ clouded ...”

“... was underway. But the most ambitious theorists – Oppenheimer as well as Bohr, Heisenberg and Max Born – still wondered what physical reality was being modelled by the maths. At Cambridge in 1926, Oppenheimer could be sure he was at the centre of things.That wasn’t the only reason he was feeling better, however. On holiday in Corsica with his Harvard ...”

“... looks like an overgrown seventeen-year-old schoolboy … wears sneakers and tight dungarees and black silk shirts … like[s] to be whipped and paints mad gorillas in grey hotel rooms drest in evening dress with deathly black umbrellas’. We have many versions of the rows between Bacon and Lacy, some of them from Bacon ...”

“... immigrants from Lithuania and Poland, Hersh grew up in the 1930s and 1940s on the predominantly black South Side of Chicago, where he worked in his parents’ dry-cleaning shop and attended community college at night. His big break came – though he didn’t know it at the time – when an English professor at the college saw his promise and arranged for ...”

“... the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of the Defence Staff that I’d met the first Duke of Wellington.15 March 1994. A reply arrives from John Major to a letter I’d written to him trying to persuade him to reform the House of Lords. It ...”

“... to squeeze violets on top of mushroom soup to make it lilac-coloured.’ If he had not seen some Max Ernst collages on his wanderings about Manhattan and decided to cut up his collected photostats on the kitchen table, Cornell might have been known only to Utopia locals.Although he left traces of his scattered preoccupations in diaries and ‘dossiers’, it ...”

“... went down to in *nawes and sailed on and foundered in, the likely answer is the northern Black Sea or the Sea of Azov.’ The mythical land of the family home might just as well be thought of as *Indo-Europe, the land east of the asterisk. The evidence for this family is archeological as well as linguistic, but language is at the heart of ...”

“... his imagination. For instance, the 1921 Three Musicians constitutes a rueful apology to the poet Max Jacob, an old bohemian friend banished by his prim new wife; the 1925 Woman with a Tambourine (Odalisque) is ‘a message to Matisse . . . a rebuke and tease’; while Mercure, the most radical of the ballet projects, is a riposte to both Cocteau and the ...”

“... in 1989, he is arguing for the ‘brilliance’ of Reni’s best work. It may well be that Max Beckmann’s painting will win history’s race against that of ‘lesser but more popular artists such as Marc Chagall’; then again, maybe not. The pessimistic, dystopian Hughes speaks with no less confidence than his optimistic twin. His voice was already ...”

“... which sound in translation like the most commonplace ‘anguished’ poet of the Nineties, Max Beerbohm’s Enoch Soames or Gilbert’s Bunthorne. Such an incongruity reveals an important truth. As a result of the Revolution and its ideology, processed and imposed in public language and propaganda, anything that a poet could utter in his own private ...”

“... face, the blonde, slicked-down hair, the moustache, in spite of the gym slip, suspenders and black silk stockings; he sprawled athwart the knee of the second Mrs Mann, who sported a long-line leather bra and splendid boots. Hand raised ready to smack his exposed botty, she turned upon the camera a toothy smile. She’d been quite pretty, in a spit-curled ...”

“... up’. After Structure, it took another sixteen years for Kuhn’s next book to appear. This was Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 (1978), the only monograph that Kuhn published after Structure, a detailed and demanding account of Max Planck’s role in the development of quantum mechanics. ...”