“... relying on him to help steer Germany through the negotiations. When Wirth became chancellor in May 1921, he appointed Rathenau minister of reconstruction, and the next month, speaking in the Reichstag, Rathenau formally announced the government’s intention to ‘fulfil’ the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, including the payment of reparations in both ...”

“... different head of state, such as Göring or Himmler, Germany might have sued for peace well before May 1945. But the Allies had agreed at Casablanca in January 1943 to demand nothing short of unconditional surrender from Germany. The armistice in the First World War had been a costly mistake, they concluded. It had allowed the far right, not least the ...”

“... in the German-run town of the same name (now transliterated as Qingdao). In Qingdao itself, you may come across the imposing Romanesque-revival edifice of St Michael’s Cathedral, which looks as if it belongs in a city somewhere in north Germany a century or so ago, as, in a sense, it does. All in all, it’s not much compared to the extensive ...”

“... a classic German Habilitationsschrift: weighty, well argued, thorough and deeply researched. It may not be an easy read – the fact that its author isn’t a native speaker of English shows at many points – but it is most certainly an indispensable ...”

“... Charterhouse of Parma’ appears in a few sentences on the last page of the novel, so he may as well call it that. The Charterhouse of Parma begins with a brilliant and incisive encapsulation of the Napoleonic romance, and its effect on Europe and on society. Any orthodox novel reader, picking up this excellent new translation by ...”

“... than of intellectualist pondering. Truth cannot be abstracted from an action so that its validity may be tested by other actions in the form of logic or science. ‘The truth of an idea,’ he says in Pragmatism, is not a stagnant property inherent to it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a ...”

“... These are the ashes of old controversy, and my excuse for raking them over is that doing so may throw light on a tiny fragment of the past which seems to grow in interest even as it begins to slip out of historical focus: that is, what it was like to grow up in the Thirties – in my case, in the late Thirties. I arrived at Westminster School, as a ...”

“... determine exactly what or how much was added to the original version or where any such additions may have been put in. Parker has convinced himself that the sure mark of any added material is that some direct reference is made in it to Pierre as a working poet or novelist. And since, again in his view, all references of this kind only begin to occur about ...”

“... been more misleading than this one. Nor is it just a question of writers like Proust and Mann, who may be said to belong to the last flowering of the 19th century. In the 1980s the tradition of setting a certain kind of novel ‘one generation back’ in time remains as vital as ever. We are accustomed to the paradox that most people’s notions of the texture ...”

“... which was ultimately, if not immediately, grounded in the supernatural. These may be the dichotomies one takes for granted, reinforced as they so often are with a wealth of anecdote. ‘Theology and Parsondom’ were, for T.H. Huxley, ‘the natural and irreconcilable enemies of science’. His professional rival ...”

“... not written into any contract: self-respect, stability, social standing. Work is ‘a road’, as Richard Sennett once wrote, ‘to the unification of the self’. Except that it doesn’t usually end up like that, which is the reason the next page of the Guardian has Jeremy Bullmore, a sage and doleful-looking ‘agony uncle’, fielding people’s problems ...”

“... which he knows well instead of skipping round the world and across three millennia. It may be this diachronic range that makes Arabia ‘half empty’ on page 194 but endure ‘overcrowding’ by page 200. And as if to widen still further the range of conquest and imperialism, Kiernan takes women on board as having ‘a good claim to be classed as ...”

“... Richard Poirier, now in his middle sixties, seems to me perhaps the most eminent of our living literary critics, at least in the United States. He has a central position in contemporary American letters, as the editor of Raritan, the best of our quarterly reviews, and as the presiding spirit of the Library of America, the definitive publisher of the classic texts of the national literature ...”

“... Sylvie’s life continues to flow, and finally there is a veiled suggestion of movement that may or may not become an escape. ‘Something is pushing them/To the side of their own lives,’ Larkin observed of a group of young mothers gathered on a recreation ground. Motherhood and death, often juxtaposed, shape the ...”

“... place in concert programmes. Of later Lieder composers, Mahler is admired for his symphonies and Richard Strauss for his symphonic poems and operas.Wolf composed around three hundred Lieder, together with mostly minor orchestral works, the most significant being the Italienische Serenade (1892), several worthy choral works, and the opera Der Corregidor ...”