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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... necessary to his Christianisation of Saxony. By the 18th century, however, that no longer washed. French as well as German writers were appalled by the barbarian warlord whom Voltaire called ‘a thousandfold murderer’, and in the 19th century the events at Verden made Charlemagne a problematic hero for German nationalists. The issue was revisited by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... generous applications of dark lipstick. Brendan Gill told me that the photographer (and pacifist) Karl Bissinger had photographed Maeve when the two had worked together at Bazaar, and the description of her I had been given was confirmed when I stopped off at the War Resisters’ League a few months ago to pick up a contact sheet of photographs that Bissinger ...”

“... was titled after Rupert Brooke’s poem, in order, as he told his wife, ‘to compete’ with him. Karl Shapiro’s best-known war poem, or anti-war poem, ‘Scyros’, used an epigraph from Brooke; it was named for the island where Brooke was buried. In an interview with the Paris Review, Shapiro spoke of reviewing a book of new poems written in the 1930s by ...”

“... the trains that carry passengers from Le Havre to Paris, every nuance of the inner workings of the French parliament, every change of fashion on the boulevards. Then there is the size of the cycle itself, twenty novels filled with events and with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of characters, many of whom reappear, creating a taut network of narrative ...”

“... but it buys you a better class of enemy (the aphorism, originally applied to money, has a ring of Karl Kraus but is Spike Milligan’s). Bennett had been dead for five years when Cape announced the imminent appearance of The Roaring Queen in 1936, but there was enough disobliging matter elsewhere in the book to alarm the publishers, and it didn’t reach ...”

“... book that the story of Wittels’s life was the story of his infatuation with three powerful men: Karl Kraus, then Freud, and then the eccentric Viennese analyst Wilhelm Stekel (‘I have committed two crimes in my life,’ Freud remarked, ‘I called attention to cocaine and I introduced Stekel to psychoanalysis’). There are formulaic references to parents ...”

“... political alternatives, it won’t just be Marx’s work that is relegated to the graveyard. Karl Polanyi, the most gifted of the social democratic theorists, has suffered the same fate. We have seen the development of a form of government I call the extreme centre, which currently rules over large tracts of Europe and includes left, centre left, centre ...”

“... during the World Cup under normal circumstances, would have gone beyond the darkest reveries of Karl Kraus. Imagine the editorials. Imagine the diagrams. The Sun would have had a daily feature called ‘Nadwatch’.12 June. I was slightly surprised to learn that Australia is richer than Japan, in terms of GDP per capita. The reason I was looking it up was ...”