“... down the second law of thermodynamics? . . . The matchless incandescent spirit of the man!’ Walter Benjamin thought a philosophy that couldn’t account for fortune-telling by means of coffee grounds couldn’t be a real philosophy. Many have thought just the reverse, of course. One mention of coffee grounds and the like, and we are no longer talking ...”

“... navigable aqueduct in Britain: the oldest, highest and longest. ‘The stream in the sky’, as Walter Scott called it, at Pontcysyllte on the Llangollen Canal, is also attributed to Telford, though with the active collaboration of the more senior engineer William Jessop and the ironmaster William Hazledine. It consists of an iron trough supported on arched ...”

“... Federal Republic as the epitome of a comfortable German modernism, far less edgy than Otto Dix, George Grosz or Max Beckmann, let alone the wild men of the 1970s and 1980s such as Joseph Beuys or Anselm Kiefer.It helped that Hitler’s personal distaste for Nolde’s work is well attested. His paintings featured prominently in the exhibition of degenerate ...”

“... then. The Shakespearean parallels offer a fittingly British version of enchantment. It’s as if George Eliot tried to write Middlemarch now and realised that the realist novel isn’t up to it in the 21st century. You can’t draw together into a single narrative an island culture wholly recalcitrant to unity. But Eliot/Smith thinks: wait! Late romance! We ...”

“... and art, together with studies of history, music and literature. She was influenced by the work of Walter Pater, and by her friendships with Henry James, Robert Browning and John Singer Sargent. But she was never swayed to the extent that she relinquished her intellectual independence. An atheist and materialist, she had no time for contemporary flirtations ...”

“... people in many other categories were and are routinely stripped of rights. Heller-Roazen refers to George Orwell, who in ‘How the Poor Die’ recounted his treatment as an indigent ‘specimen’ in a charity hospital in France in 1921, and to the sociologist Erving Goffman, whose dissertation in 1953 concerned the ‘civil inattention’ practised on ...”

“... She had an (illegal) abortion, aged eighteen, after her domestic employer got her pregnant. Dr George Clinton Jeffrey and Dr Crippen, his new assistant, recently arrived from Salt Lake City, carried it out. After a detailed sketch of the German immigrant community in Brooklyn (beer halls, German-language theatres, singing societies), Rubenhold forces us to ...”

“... wasn’t soft duty: he left Greece only a couple of days before the bullet-ridden body of his pal George Polk, he of the other eponymous journalism award, was found in Salonika Bay.‘Mile for mile, cablegram for cablegram, there probably isn’t a foreign correspondent in the business who covers a wider beat, and covers it harder,’ Newsweek wrote of Sparks ...”

“... through a person, as Heidi had. The tighty-whities were what had unlocked it for her. Cranston – Walter White in Breaking Bad – standing with his legs spread against that desert background, his head full of chemical equations. To write for someone’s capabilities, or even just a little beyond them. He would be perfect, Heidi said. It would be ...”

“... envelopes, clustered around a postage stamp of a steam engine securing magazine clippings about George Sand. Were these fragments of poems too? Lavinia recognised that she lacked the expertise to sort through the papers, but was determined that her sister’s work should be published. She turned to her sister-in-law, Sue, the woman to whom Emily had sent ...”

“... things wrong, as he sometimes does. But Gifford tells us that Edward VII had tattoos, as did George V, as did Nicholas II of Russia and Alphonso XII of Spain, not to speak of Lady Randolph Churchill. Slote, Mamigonian and Turner add that Edward VII ‘received his first tattoo in 1862’, and then give us a source for this, as they generally do. But they ...”

“... to cover and was profoundly re-educated in the process. Here I came into contact with the work of Walter Benjamin, which had a decisive impact on me, as readers of Imagined Communities will immediately recognise. On visits to London, I began to meet the NLR circle and make friends among them. I liked and respected no one more than Tom Nairn, the Scottish ...”

“... is in Blessings, Kicks and Curses) he develops a very just and instructive distinction between Walter Scott, prepared to compromise with his public, and Wordsworth, not so prepared; then realises that this is just the distinction that Leavis would have made and, instead of welcoming Leavis as an ally, marks out his distinction from him by talking of his ...”

“... to settle Europe’s ‘people apart’ in Palestine. In 1916 he became Foreign Secretary in Lloyd George’s coalition Government and in 1917 made the Zionist prescription British policy. The Declaration went to Lord Rothschild on 2 November 1917, when British forces commanded by General Sir Edmund Allenby were overrunning Palestine. ‘Weizmann’s principal ...”