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“... as ‘self-realisation’, was ripe with potential for illiberal outcomes. The upshot of both the French and the Russian Revolutions (Berlin had experienced the second of these as a boy) was authoritarian state structures restrictive of individual freedoms. Negative liberty from constraints seemed a ‘more humane ideal’ than the otherwise admirable goal of ...”

“... had Lincoln not been assassinated, or Bobby Kennedy – or more sombre fantasies, like Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, in which Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide the US between them. But these historical variants are not genuine time-travel narratives on the order of H.G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895), which ...”

“... Notturna is divided into three parts. The first opens dramatically onto a staccato account of the French pogrom of 1321 against lepers and Jews, accused of poisoning wells in a plot against Christendom orchestrated by the Muslim ‘King of Granada’. It then moves to 1348 and the massacre of Jews as agents of a conspiracy spreading the Black Death, which ...”

“... chairs very reasonably in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less ...”

“... historians should consult his remarks on X, Catacomb, and the New English Weekly edited by Philip Mairet, a man of integrity and enthusiasm whom Sisson affectionately evokes: ‘his eyes would light up as visibly as the bulbs on a pin-table, as the ideas rattled round.’ The bohemian world of poets, painters and little magazines, the ‘natural ...”

“... techniques of seduction. Auden was important in other ways. To Britten, words, whether Italian, French or English, spontaneously suggested music. Some of the words provided by Auden might well have looked unpromising, but he set them anyway. He enthusiastically accepted Auden’s rather unsatisfactory book for Paul Bunyan, and it seemed certain that they ...”

“... Girls, which featured an interview with a 21-year-old woman who had had 789 lovers. ‘Prince Philip, Mary Whitehouse, Lord Hailsham and Brigid Brophy were all quoted on what they thought about the subject.’ The only sex-related subject not permitted in the paper was homosexuality. Murdoch was against it: ‘Do you really think the readers are ...”

“... embody this same point: the book opens with Herr contemplating an old map left over from French colonial times, and pondering the uselessness of all abstract Chartings of the war’s terrain, and it ends by insisting on everyone’s personal participation in the conflict: ‘Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there.’ The extent of the ...”

“... period – wore the same clothes is to deny the realities of a society structured around class.’ Philip Wright proposes that special reception areas should be attached to museums, where the categories of objects the museum contains (‘white man’s art’ and so on), the ‘jobs and personalities’ of their donors and the curricula vitae of the staff will ...”

“... A recent new-wave soccer-book gives something of the flavour: Albert Camus, Algerian goalie and French Existentialist, never took a penalty but it would have been interesting to watch him try (if, say, a penalty shoot-out against a Structuralist XI went all the way to the respective goalkeepers during sudden death). Would Camus have beaten an upright and ...”

“... rose to sanctity by clinging to the coattails, or more exactly the robes, of Ignatius Loyola and Philip Neri. So much for the growth of cults at the periphery. But there is also the problem of explaining how and why some of these cults were adopted by the centre and made official. The heroic virtue of the candidates had to satisfy the examiners. To ...”

“... Mustaza’fin is usually translated as ‘the deprived’ or ‘the disinherited’ – in French, as les misérables or les damnés. Khomeini had borrowed the word from both the Koran and from Shari’ati, for it was not in ordinary use before the revolution (Shari’ati had used it in his translation of Fanon’s Damnés de la Terre). This was a word ...”

“... thought much about it’. After this avowal of broad-mindedness (the tale has already been told in Philip Williams’s Hugh Gaitskell) she was fit to be introduced to (Sir) Maurice Bowra and all the other intellectual roisterers. Was it really as simple and half-baked as this? Gaitskell, we learn, was ‘eager to fix his own identity through instructing others ...”

“... The French prefer an allusive style in biography, with as little as possible of the scaffolding of scholarship showing. Jean Lacouture’s magisterial De Gaulle is virtually unfootnoted, has only a small bibliography and contains many verbatim conversations or remarks by De Gaulle that we have to take on trust, as well as many ironic thrusts and tight logical turns which can nearly knock you off your chair ...”

“... the introduction of the Listerian method.’ It was the same across Europe: Scottish, Danish and French as well as German hospitals became less dangerous. But carbolic was not safe. It was absorbed through the skin and poisoned patients and surgeons, causing kidney damage (black urine was a tell-tale symptom). And laboratory tests showed that it was much ...”