“... made up the ‘Hanover connection’: Sigmar Gabriel, former minister of the economy, and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, once Schröder’s chief of staff and now Germany’s president. Steinmeier has been fiercely criticised by Ukraine’s media-savvy ambassador to Berlin, Andriy Melnyk, who accuses him of cosying up to Putin just like his former boss. On 12 ...”

“... thinking which found ultimate expression in Aristotle and Plato. It would be ridiculous to say George Thomson’s ideas are refuted, or even contested, by such an argument (and he is unmentioned in the book’s bibliography). But the turn of thought is characteristic of An Unfinished History. Its writer emerges from his thickets of trivia only to muse like ...”

“... period of role-reversal designed to make the system more tolerable to the majority. Long before Walter Bagehot, the Venetians had realised the importance of the separation between the ‘dignified’ and the ‘efficient’ parts of the political system, and the doge, that ‘sacred central symbol’ which the Florentines lacked, performed the function of ...”

“... injustice was accompanied by a pious fantasy of purity, of a language being violated. It was Walter Benjamin, in 1931, who wrote what is in many ways still the most revealing essay on Kraus and his ‘struggle against the empty phrase, which is the linguistic expression of the despotism with which, in journalism, topicality sets up its dominion over ...”

“... medievalist who saw the ‘life of forms’ as an almost autonomous force in art, and the American George Kubler, an expert in pre-Columbian artefacts for whom the Panofskyan emphasis on individual style, strict chronology and iconographic analysis (the hunting for sources of images in documents) was not helpful in a field where known artists, exact dates and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... flattery,I pluck this white rose with Plantagenet.It was another two hundred years before Walter Scott’s novel Anne of Geierstein, published in 1829, brought the idea of the ‘wars of the White and Red Roses’ into common usage. Since then it has become synonymous with the political turmoil which, between 1455 and 1485, saw four English kings ...”

“... formaldehyde. But the career started in shoes. Warhol caused a bit of bother at college with some George Grosz-like drawings of little boys with their fingers stuck up their noses. Grosz’s notion of Dada – ‘the organised use of insanity to express contempt for a bankrupt world’ – was evidently Warhol’s for a minute or two, but the American boy was ...”

“... But FoE’s caution did not destroy its appeal. One great favourite with the press at the time was Walter Patterson, a Canadian-born eco-writer with a degree in nuclear physics, and the capacity to puncture, with a three-sentence letter to a newspaper, or a paragraph of asides in a book, the empty claims of many nuclear industry spokesmen (see, for ...”

“... is the description of the ancient Scottish seat of the Roman Catholic earls of Glenallan in Walter Scott’s The Antiquary. The late Countess, ‘partly from a haughty contempt of the times in which she lived, partly from her sense of family pride’, had not permitted the interiors to be modernised. The ‘valuable collection of pictures’, which hung ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his pastoral scenes à la Claud Lovat Fraser and Chelsea set subjects such as ‘The Thief’ from Walter de la Mare’s Peacock Pie, for which he drew a kidnapper with a sackful of kiddies prancing past wigwam mountains and silhouette trees. Burra probably attended de la Mare’s lecture on ‘Atmosphere in Fiction’ at the Royal College of Art in April ...”