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“... 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 ...”

“... emphasis on the divine presence in history, progressive revelation, and human perfectibility, Karl Barth’s commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans emphasised the otherness and absolute sovereignty of God, the fallen nature of humanity, and the importance of decisions precipitated by an encounter with divine revelation. For Agamben, the state of ...”

“... Therborn sees as the major 19th-century challengers to patriarchy. While the American and French Revolutions were not concerned with the liberation of women, this was to be a central element in socialist and Communist ones. Hence, in the 20th century he sees the major ‘broad ideological currents behind determined thrusts into the fortress of ...”

“... year’s International Booker Prize. The novel may remind English readers, in different ways, of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (the relationship with the domineering father, the unchanged names, the treatment of time, the reflections on memory, art and writing) or Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (the postwar childhood in Naples, the treatment of ...”

“... privileged the pupils were: with a population of about seven million and after nearly a century of French colonial occupation, there was very little secondary education in Cambodia and no higher education at all. When independence was granted in 1953 only 144 Cambodians had the baccalauréat. When he first reached Saigon in 1948, on his way to study in ...”

“... our trees and houses, have longer histories than our country. My family home in Bouillon, on the French border, is decked with photographs of relatives who were born before Belgium was created. There are wooden clogs under the stairs that are older than Belgium. My family is working-class and post-industrial: Walloon first, European second and Belgian ...”

“... the early English colonists. They could not afford the more languid colonialism of the Russian and French empires, whose fur traders established tributaries and commerce over the course of centuries, as well as making occasional attempts at the religious indoctrination of peoples in the tundra and wilderness that no settler planned to inhabit. The strength and ...”