“... 1941, he boarded the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle along with 350 other ‘undesirables’, among them Victor Serge, who described the ship as ‘a kind of floating concentration camp’. Lévi-Strauss found the ascetic Serge unapproachable, but while docked in Casablanca he struck up a lasting friendship with André Breton, with whom, Wilcken writes, he shared ...”

“... project. This wasn’t the first time deconstruction had been accused of being soft on Nazism. Victor Farias’s devastating study had shown that Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies were far deeper than had been realised – and less easily disentangled from his work – and put deconstruction in an uncomfortable position. Derrida was not uncritical of ...”

“... Netanyahu has taken a more indulgent attitude towards the antisemitism of his friends. When Victor Orbán launched an antisemitic campaign against George Soros, provoking the ire of Israel’s ambassador to Budapest, Netanyahu came to the defence of his Hungarian ally against Soros, a critic of the occupation. Neither Saudi antisemitism nor Saudi ...”

“... may still be cowboys everywhere, but we will also be seeing the market restored to the purity of Adam Smith’s description, excavated and cleansed of encrustation after a hundred and fifty years in the industrial bureaucratic swamp. In Search of Excellence was an immediate million-seller, and its success unleashed a flurry of like-minded books. Tom Peters ...”

“... could answer: ‘Well, it’s my church too.’ But one contributor to the oral history project, Victor Mendolia, sees it as significant that two weeks later, when the church was opening a hospice for people with Aids, a news reporter on NBC asked Cardinal O’Connor, ‘Don’t you think it odd that you continue to open up hospices for people to die in, yet ...”

“... an embassy to a mountaintop shrine in Ceylon reputed to have a slab of marble impressed with Adam’s footprint. Others held that this shrine honoured not Adam but the ascetic prince ‘Sagamoni Burcan’ (Shakayamuni Buddha) – revered at the time as a Christian saint. As for the khan’s summer capital in ...”

“... Paul-Lemerle along with an extraordinary group of escapees from Vichy France including Breton, Victor Serge, Germaine Krull, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Anna Seghers, whose novel Transit (1944) narrated the deadly catch-22s of exit visas at that most precarious of times. ‘It was more like the departure of a convict ship,’ Lévi-Strauss recalled in Tristes ...”

“... and supposedly moribund Europe. Africanesque wood sculptures by Brancusi didactically entitled Adam and Eve, Socrates, Little French Girl and – shown below – King of Kings (Spirit of Buddha) together define the breadth of the perceived cultural malaise and the role of self-conscious primitivism as plasma: ‘self-conscious’ because it was the product ...”

“... lived in an insular Jewish world and never thought of themselves as Poles. Ben-Gurion’s father, Victor, was an early supporter of Theodor Herzl and nurtured his son’s Zionism; Ben-Gurion claimed that he knew at the age of three that he would eventually live in Palestine. In his teens he joined Po’alei Zion (‘Workers of Zion’) and soon established ...”

“... into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, in 1764, the year in which he succeeded Adam Smith in the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow. At 70 he retired to prepare his lectures for publication. They appeared as the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man and the Essays on the Active Powers of Man, in 1785 and 1788 respectively.Reid had ...”

“... coverage. Feeling there against the slave trade gathered gradually. Scots economists – like Adam Smith in 1776 – agreed with French Physiocrats in arguing that slave labour was unproductive. Quakers, as Blackburn says, and as can be said of Dissenters in general, being debarred from politics could devote time and energy to better things, like the ...”

“... well supplied with sources. In addition to official documents, chroniclers such as Henry Knighton, Adam Usk, Thomas Walsingham and Jean Froissart wrote detailed narratives, partisan but not of one mind. For obvious reasons, their histories focus on the nobility. Although England was a precociously centralised realm with a sophisticated bureaucracy, it had ...”

“... ennobled, intermarried and converted to Christianity, formed an alternative aristocracy. Nathan Adam Arnstein’s wife Fanny brought the idea of the literary salon from Berlin to Vienna; a series of Jewish hostesses carried on the tradition until the end of the Empire. But it was not these dynasties that formed the character of the Jewish community of ...”

“... on sugar production, but Fanon had little contact with them. He attended the prestigious Lycée Victor Schoelcher, where his teacher was the poet Aimé Césaire, who had won praise in Paris from André Breton for his 1939 poem ‘Notebook of a Return to My Native Land’. Césaire was one of the founders of the Négritude movement, which Fanon admired for ...”

“... he wrote as if his modern French models had never existed. More than that, he wrote as if Victor Hugo had never existed. The tightly focused language which Eliot and Pound discovered and coveted in the French moderns was simply not what attracted Brennan. The proof is in his unshaken capacity to compose with the English equivalent of the full poncif ...”