“... 18th century. He had spent his long exile reading whatever he could find, including books on the French Revolution and Rousseau, on whom he eventually wrote a PhD thesis. Among his discoveries in a bookshop frequented by senior Party leaders had been an account of Gandhi in a book by Chester Bowles, a reluctant Cold Warrior and American ambassador to India ...”

“... But during the 1970s and 1980s, encouraged by left-wing professors who were inspired, in turn, by French thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida, a new politics disseminated from university campuses that rejected such binding concepts as citizenship and duty. It emphasised the special status individuals could acquire by virtue of their claim to a particular ...”

“... according to Sargent, because they are both destroyers of international order. In the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon wrecked what was left of the legitimate order of Europe. Trump, in turn, has apparently ended the American world order, or, as Sargent prefers to call it, Pax Americana. Sargent’s is an extraordinary suggestion, even though ...”

“... an academic in Switzerland – he retained his membership of the NSDAP until 1945. His compatriot Karl Roemer, an advocate-general to the court, spent the war in occupied Paris managing French companies and banks for the Third Reich; after the war, he married Adenauer’s niece, and acted as defence lawyer for the Waffen SS ...”

“... rank, just above Iraq and Afghanistan. These bottom-liners are unofficially classified as what the French sometimes call the ‘petits pays de merde’ – shitty little countries – and most of the visa-free travel on offer to them is to other shitty little countries. To visit the UK, they need a visa. The Home Office doesn’t publish annual figures for UK ...”

“... History, and in the local bookstore Jewish history covers more space than the whole of German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and East European history combined. Memoirs, anthologies, coffee-table books, novels and textbooks run thickly from the presses. The high point was reached in the President’s Commission on the Holocaust appointed by Jimmy ...”

“... a comprehensive economic plan. Central planning is usually associated with Marxism, though Karl Marx himself expressed only a vague hope of bringing industry under political control and getting rid of ‘haggling’ (Schacher). Friedrich Engels was more specific, asserting in 1878 that socialism would eliminate the ‘social anarchy’ of capitalist ...”

“... the emergence during the Restoration of the textual procedures associated with the German scholar Karl Lachmann, usually regarded as the main originator of modern techniques of recension – as opposed to emendation – of ancient texts, which he applied to Lucretius, the Nibelungenlied and St Luke alike. La genesi del metodo del Lachmann assured Timpanaro an ...”

“... the generation of SPD politicians that came to prominence in the Eighties. With fluent French from his borderland upbringing, he is intellectually better prepared than Schröder, with more decided views about the future. As Minister of Finance, and Chairman of the SPD, his position in the new regime is unusually strong. Lafontaine is the first ...”

“... By now I have managed to bag most of the others on the list, including the Brothers Goncourt on French 18th-century Painters, Cellini’s Life, Baudelaire’s The Mirror of Art, Fromentin’s The Masters of Past Time, and the essential The Journal of Delacroix, which ideally should be owned in no other way. By the time Huizinga’s Erasmus of Rotterdam was ...”

“... it featured Hamlet, dated from a decade or more earlier; it seems to have taken its events from a French prose narrative of the 1570s, which itself translated and adapted a Norse legend embedded in Saxo Grammaticus’s 13th-century Danish History. The original Norse legend is very brutal and very bloody. The further source or impulse of Elizabethan revenge ...”

“... Russian rabbinate had historically supported the anti-semitic Tsar against Bonaparte, viewing the French as bearers of secularism and enlightenment. The other is that he saw, in the attachment of many Jewish intellectuals to Marxism, a sort of displaced messianic impulse. This certainly aided his persistent misreading of Marx and of what he thought of as ...”

“... camps themselves, run by guards and privileged prisoners. At the top the spoils were considerable. Karl Otto Koch, commandant first of Majdanek and then Buchenwald, stole on the scale of a major drug lord. He was executed by an SS firing squad just before the war ended. In keeping with the KL’s macho ethos, he refused a blindfold. The needs​ of German ...”

“... as early as 1833 were calling ‘the annihilation of space by time’, 25 years before Karl Marx used the phrase in the Grundrisse. Along with the speed of the trains was the shock of the speed with which the railways spread, gouging cuttings out of hills, flinging embankments across bowls of land, boring and blasting tunnels through solid ...”

“... I heard that Congressman Walter Jones, Republican from North Carolina and the man who renamed French fries ‘freedom fries’, was now calling for the withdrawal of US troops. I heard him say: ‘The American people are getting to a point here: how much more can we take?’ I heard Congressman Mike Pence, Republican from Indiana, explain why he is ...”