“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... when it comes to appraising literature, at the expense of whatever ‘social entity’ can lay claim to it. The strong line taken by both Edna Longley and W.J. McCormack – who are sometimes in accord, but more often at loggerheads – testifies to the ebullience of Irish letters, in which things often get very heated indeed. Not invariably, it’s ...”

“... the psychoanalytic societies in Vienna and London. In an effort at reconciliation, Jones and Paul Federn arranged a series of exchange lectures in 1935-36, those from London being given by Jones on ‘Early Female Sexuality’ and Joan Riviere, and those from Vienna by Robert Waelder. In June 1938, the Nazi annexation of Austria forced Freud and his ...”

“... from the Ukraine could be as good a sailor as they.’ It was this kind of thorough expertise that lay behind the famous wish ‘to make you see’; and there is even more than that to Conrad’s compelling accuracy of thing and detail. It does the deep work for him, making supererogatory many of his more explicitly intellectual démarches. Or should one ...”

“... the cast iron and other modern construction techniques that were transforming the landscape that lay beyond the Picturesque parks of the country houses. Britain’s internal stability had encouraged industrialisation – as well as the art market – and Schinkel was one of those who understood that this was where visitors might learn the most instructive ...”