“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... While Balle’s septology shares some of the ambition of the epic Norwegian septologies of Karl Ove Knausgaard and Jon Fosse, one of the questions she seems concerned with in Book I is not how much she can cram into a novel but how little can she get away with: will one day, one character, one house be enough?In interviews, Balle says her life is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and his mother, Baladine Klossowska (with whom, though she came from Breslau, he corresponded in French), Lord Kitchener and Walther Rathenau, Alexander Zaharov and Marianne Mitford, Gerhart Hauptmann, Hofmannsthal and Heinrich Mann, the philosopher Georg Simmel and the philosophical essayist Rudolf Kassner, as well as Gide and Valéry (both of whom he ...”

“... engineering problems for an audience of awed scientists, six-foot Brezhnev pencils from the Karl Liebknecht Pencil Factory, Asian rugs embroidered with words of squirming servility, miniature machine tools presented with love from the working people of Krasnodar, a Vietnamese portrait of him wearing a real suit and with real medals glued to the canvas ...”

“... The second book was Terrorism and Communism (1919) by the German Social Democrat, Karl Kautsky. ‘The leaders of the proletariat,’ Kautsky wrote, ‘have begun to resort to extreme measures, bloody measures – to terror.’ Koba has ringed these words, and written ‘ha-ha’ in the margin. These off-the-cuff reactions are scarcely ...”

“... parquet floors (in the rest of the apartment), closets, windows, hinges, lampshades, doors (French and regular), locks (two kinds), doorknobs (three kinds), nickel-plated doorstops, an electric doorbell, enamel bathtub with overflow drain and nickel-plated plug, nickel-plated shower’ and so on. Sometimes the lists are of abstract nouns, such as the ...”

“... the house, by his father. At first he laboriously carries the volumes in heaps out through the french windows into the kitchen garden and dumps them on a bonfire he has lit especially. Before adding each load he pokes the books around the edge of the fire into the middle with a convenient long stick. Later, he pulls the books from the shelves and douses ...”

“... autobiography, idle fashion-industry reminiscence, unchallenging portraits of top designers (Karl Lagerfeld, Claude Montana, Donatella Versace, Helmut Lang, Bella Freud), and, most disappointingly, under-researched, under-considered lit crit. These are held vaguely together by a meandering personal-quest narrative, the sort of thing that, if made into a ...”

“... fall with the amount of money in circulation. He traces this way of thinking to the 16th-century French jurist Jean Bodin, who blamed inflation on the glut of gold and silver reaching the Continent from the Spanish colonies. In fact, Graeber says, most of that loot didn’t get to Europe at all but was reinvested in other colonies and markets. QTM always ...”

“... known, and now, like Baxandall, long removed from the immediate circle of Leavisians: for example, Karl Miller in this country, Richard Poirier and (perhaps surprisingly) Norman Podhoretz in New York. They fanned out into their own careers, but most, even if alienated or excommunicated, freely allow that he made his mark on them. He had his own idols or ...”