“... for low life’, and we can be fairly certain he contracted syphilis there. The Treponema lay low in him until 1910, when he had a severe bilious attack and developed headaches and back pain, severe enough for him to stay in sanatoria in Dresden and Wiesbaden. Over the next decade he developed numbness in his hands and blurred vision, and in the early ...”

“... whose sailors got drunk in port and injured people in fights. But it was difficult for navies to lay down the law in the ocean expanse until the development of better naval weaponry. Bosco implies that ships had a limited ability to engage one another at sea until the end of the Age of Sail. This underestimates the trireme ram, Korea’s armoured Geobukseon ...”

“... no Jewish survivors of the camps stood as witnesses at the trial. Antisemitism lay somewhere in the background here, but more immediately important was de Gaulle’s shamelessly misleading version of French behaviour under the occupation. Almost everyone, it ran, had supported the Resistance in thought if not in deed, and France had been ...”

“... Enlightenment waged their wars against superstition and l’infâme. The Republic of Letters–as Paul Hazard argued long ago in a classic book – provided the stage on which the crisis of the modern European mind was enacted. Goldgar seeks to map this imaginary state, offering precise surveys of its borders and colourful sketches of its local topographies ...”

“... nevertheless be found in Schmitt’s text, when he spoke of an ‘order of human things’ that lay in the return to an undefiled nature. It was this natural order, Strauss remarked, which the liberal conception of culture had forgotten. Schmitt took these objections in his stride, making a few quiet adjustments in subsequent editions of his work to ...”

“... has caused the deaths of two million people, has, by contrast, engendered a scientific and lay literature so vast that it defies easy summation or analysis. WHO estimates that several thousand people become infected with one or other of the strains of HIV every day. This figure is almost matched by the number of articles, bulletins, statistical ...”

“... and negative: ‘Derrida’s deconstructive reversals are strategic interventions. They do not lay the groundwork for a new discipline – grammatology, he says, is the name of a question – but apply pressure to a system of concepts, upset it so as to make its presuppositions and limitations more apparent.’ I have left to the last the consideration of ...”

“... an authority-figure, echoing sentiments which also uphold authority in the state. The educated lay down the rules of grammar, as they lay down the laws. The connections between obedience in the two spheres is one that forcibly strikes both sides, and evokes very different emotions. ‘Grammer in learning is like tyranny ...”

“... the hillside and are spreading over the lower meadow. Yes, the hill is coming down with hazel, as Paul Muldoon says. I’ve brought a bow saw with me and I begin cutting away some of the tall wands. Should I be disturbing this place? In among the stones, as I lift them, are a few large torpid worms which I put in the shopping bag I’ve brought. There’s a ...”

“... than a plight. What Goethe learned in Italy, Boyle says, was ‘where his true spiritual home lay – not, after all, in Mignon’s Vicenza but in a land where only those who knew yearning could know what he suffered’. Not in Italy but in Germany, that is, though both places have become allegories of desire, and strange, exclusive ideas crowd into the ...”

“... have had pride of place. For a careful and balanced account of them, there is no finer study than Paul Ginsborg’s Italy and Its Discontents, the work of an English historian in Florence, originally published in Italian, the latest monument to critical admiration of the country by a foreign scholar. Long-standing occupation of office has not been peculiar to ...”

“... skills that made him a household name (‘the most famous Italian in the world’, Dal Monte says) lay in man management and public relations as much as – if not more than – engineering or driving, though his monomania, ambition and aesthetic judgment certainly helped too. He had a gift for hiring the right people and inspiring (or coercing) them to do ...”

“... same laugh as my father gave out when I said I wanted to be a film star. I think the great joke lay in the idea that we might go on holiday. In any event, we did eventually go on holiday – to Butlin’s holiday camp in Skegness – and the Moon came along very loyally. I was getting into poetry and the Moon was becoming a thing to conjure with for the ...”

“... type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing ...”

“... for his own good or our pleasure but to be fully invested in realism as Jameson understands it. Paul de Man once said that Georg Lukács wrote about the novel as if he was the novel. Jameson doesn’t do that, but he does write about the novel in terms of a long-standing intimacy with the form, as if it were a roommate, say. This is a report from the ...”