“... and triggering the libs. He was fond of quoting the most incendiary pronouncements of 19th-century French reactionaries such as Louis Veuillot and Joseph de Maistre (for example, sovereignty ‘is always one, inviolable and absolute’). Above all, he started to discuss his ultimate preference for Catholic integralism: a subordination of the state to the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at first, but by the second day he can’t work because he’s troubled by a child practising the French horn, by the din from a sawmill and by happy children playing outside, whom he eventually yells at: ‘Why don’t you go and pick mushrooms?’ He then discovers that the children belong to his neighbour, a sleep-deprived shift worker at the local mill ...”

“... standards of Central Europe: alongside Czech schools, it could boast German gymnasia, Russian and French lycées, and an English grammar school. It was to the last that his parents sent the nine-year-old Ernest in 1935, perhaps prudently preparing for a time when they would have to flee mainland Europe. They almost left it too late; they were fortunate to ...”

“... the linguistic theories of Hermann Usener on the names of the gods, the baggy cultural history of Karl Lamprecht and even Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (‘At last a book that helps me’). His interest in the rendering of agitated draperies in Renaissance Italian art – particularly those of Botticelli, the subject of his ...”

“... in the early 20th century, and adopted much the same way of life. He was in love with modern French literature, and out of love with his native academy. He wanted to drift and burrow in a city that seemed ‘more like home’ to him than Berlin – the phrase crops up in a letter from 1913 – but at the same time deeply strange, deeply alien. Mostly he ...”

“... bedevilled gay politics for as long as there has been gay politics. The first homosexual activist, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who began his efforts around 1862, divided human males at first into ‘Dionings’ and ‘Urnings’, the latter defined in a famous phrase as men with a woman’s soul confined by a man’s body. But Ulrichs later became dissatisfied with ...”

“... little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight ...”

“... crescent when Rupert spots in a pile of abandoned stuff outside one of the houses, a rise and fall French light fitting, white pottery shade, a little battered, but with the counterweight intact. It’s a nice find, though, like its ex-owners, we don’t need the fitting, but if we did … It’s cheering for R., who’s in turmoil over developments at the ...”