“... to make the theft secure’. Not that this does him any good: Ungrateful man! But vain thy black design, Th’attempt, and not the deed, thy hand defiled; Preserved by his own charms and spells divine, Safely the gentle Shakespeare slept and smiled. Shakespeare remains untouchable, serenely away with the fairies, an outcome rigged from the start: the ...”

“... Politics,​ Max Weber wrote, is a ‘slow, strong drilling through hard boards, with a combination of passion and a sense of judgment’. The maxim, from his lecture ‘Politics as a Vocation’, is now usually deployed to chide a left impatient for social transformation, but Weber’s account of political leadership deserves more than this ...”

“... cello.’ Kate Kennedy was in the audience. The cello, lost for more than eighty years in the black hole of the Holocaust, was there because of her book.When she was fifteen, Kennedy won a cello scholarship to Wells Cathedral School and began to practise with the intensity and single-mindedness of an elite athlete preparing for competition. But a year ...”

“... the stage, a Pomeranian, and another, a Pekingese, and myself. We also had a parlourmaid who was black, which was a rarity in those days, and she was called – to her face, I believe – ‘Black Mary’. It was not till some two or three years after we moved that my father found it necessary to have a chauffeur, and then ...”

“... the jurisdiction of the state from which the first mid-level culprit to be caught, the doleiro (black market money-changer) Alberto Youssef, hailed: the atypically middle-class provincial society of Paraná, in the south of Brazil. Moro, a native son who had cut his teeth as an assistant in the mensalão trial, was the presiding judge in its capital ...”

“... The difference is very clear if we compare him with the great theorist of modern polytheism, Max Weber. In Weber, the gods that have risen from their graves in a disenchanted world are truly warring – there is no common standard of value, no conceivable truce, among them, any more than in the world of the great powers. The hope of a eudaimonist ...”

“... SNP’s open-door citizenship policy which would, for example, allow the illegitimate offspring of black American GIs stationed in Scotland to be as Scottish as ... well, Sir Nicholas himself. Vote Tory to preserve the Scot-Brit race. This eccentric addendum to the Unionist creed was not openly endorsed by Fairbairn’s successor as Tory candidate, a generally ...”

“... political fringes in the West, refused to believe the rape allegations. The Grayzone journalists Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté tweeted about ‘fabricated atrocity tales’ and accused the Patten report of ‘laundering’ the ‘Hamas mass rape hoax’. Their denialism galvanised Israel’s defenders. The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens said that he ...”

“... carparks at Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle are filled with sleek creations, art-directed to the max by Mercedes and Renault to convey futurity, Concorde still looks as if a crack has opened in the fabric of the Universe and a message from tomorrow has been poked through. Age has, however, made it clear that the tomorrow in question is yesterday’s ...”

“... to escape their origins altogether. Mitteleuropa was a German invention, famously theorised by Max Weber’s friend Friedrich Naumann during the first World War. Naumann’s conception remains arrestingly topical. The Central Europe he envisaged was to be organised around a Germanic nucleus, combining Prussian industrial efficiency and Austrian cultural ...”

“... literature to the visual arts. Taking its title from Shakespeare, and its imagery from Tiepolo and Max Ernst, Conquering Peace focuses on the successive attempts to exorcise war in Europe from the 18th century to the present, a theme it develops with unfailing grace, verve and lucidity. For Ghervas, the peace settlements which ended each great outbreak of ...”

“... the way human life could find rebirth and transformation, 2001 was a natural successor to the black and white projection of the way this world would end. Dr Strangelove was still showing in second-run theatres soon after I learned about the effects just one hydrogen bomb would have, but what struck me then was not the political warning so much as the ...”

“... front line moves further away, without quite disappearing. He quotes the Kyiv-born Russian poet Max Voloshin’s description of Paris in 1915:Before the Battle of the Marne it saw streams of refugees and hundreds of thousands of soldiers pass through, didn’t sleep for several nights in anticipation of the hoofbeats of the German cavalry, then settled down ...”

“... question the Almighty.’ And, uncategorisably, 2009’s Burning Man Festival, in the vast Black Rock Desert of Nevada, featured the theme of ‘Evolution’: the 12-metre human shape – burned to extinction at festival’s end – roseabove a ‘tangled bank’ consisting of irregular wooden triangles … At night the tangled bank came alive with ...”

“... it was a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its rival, the Sunday Times, which looked untidy and grey by comparison. Throughout the 1950s it was the dominant ‘quality’ Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the young if not always in terms of ...”