“... the standard by which all other works about Charles should be judged’ is the German historian Karl Brandi’s whopping Kaiser Karl V. Embarking on it in 1907, Brandi published Volume 1 thirty years later. It was translated into English two years after that: just in time for Anne Frank to read it in her secret Amsterdam ...”

“... phenomenon. Prince Max Hohenlohe noted that his family had produced ‘a German chancellor, a French marshal, a Roman Catholic cardinal, a number of Austro-Hungarian field-marshals, generals of Prussia and Baden, hereditary marshals of Württemberg, and ADCs general to the Russian tsar’. Such men routinely spoke and read not only their native language ...”

“... may take part, and in which O’Brien and Kurins take part. The celebrated car chase in the first French Connection film may have made an impression on O’Brien: he can even look like an upmarket version of the frantic, hard-nosed detective of that chase, who hijacks a car and races it against a subway train carrying an evil drug-dealer. It seemed bad enough ...”

“... missing – for there would be no Bella and no clock.’ She took the clock, and it was missed by French Louise, whose suspicion that she had a rival was confirmed by the discovery of a pair of hairpins in his flat. ‘You traitor with the double face,’ she stormed. This play on the two sorts of double face may register with some as a stylistic stroke on ...”

“... Paul Lafargue drove Engels to despair. Negotiating with other French socialists over the founding of the Parti Ouvrier Français in 1881, he committed ‘blunder after blunder’ and nearly wrecked the whole thing. In 1889, charged with organising the founding conference of the Second International in Paris, he was making ‘a terrible hash of things ...”

“... with them. He was not new to jealousy, having had experience of Olive Schreiner’s obsession with Karl Pearson, professor of applied mathematics at University College London. But his inability to face his wife’s true nature was both ironic and painful. Ironic, because here he was, engaged in prolonged theoretical discussion of these very things. The pain ...”

“... this is the right view; and it goes directly counter to a pronouncement such as that of Frederick Karl, in his Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (1979), who says that Conrad’s work should be seen as ‘part of a curving seamless extension of self and creation’. The truth, on the contrary, is that the seams are all-important; or rather that one is ...”

“... of the London Review, and analysed in that amazingly many-layered book Doubles by its co-editor, Karl Miller. But something new and strange has been happening in North America – a veritable epidemic of multiple personalities. It began about 1972. It was called an epidemic by one psychiatrist in an essay published in 1982. By 1992 the disorder is ...”

“... Marianne Weber’s circle preserved the memory of Max (Elias gave a paper at her ‘salon’). Karl Jaspers and Karl Löwith were beginning to work through the Weberian legacy, and Heidelberg was home also to a young American called Talcott Parsons, who later presented his own straitjacketed, functionalist version of ...”

“... resolve this enigma, notably Michael Löwy’s From Romanticism to Bolshevism, first published in French in 1976.1 Lukacs himself, towards the end of his life, lifted the curtain on his early years in a number of interviews and in a memoir entitled Gelebtes Denken.2 More recently, Lee Congdon’s The Young Lukacs has emphasised the decisive influence of three ...”

“... and political alienation under a German ancien régime that would be overthrown, just as its French counterpart had been in 1789-94. This revolution would be carried out, he said, by the one class that had nothing to lose and so could claim to be universal: the proletariat. Marx pursued these ideas in his unpublished ‘Paris Manuscripts’, which ...”

“... his hands, which were never uncovered, grey suede gloves’. For Churchill, who much admired his French counterpart, Clemenceau was ‘as much as a single human being, miraculously magnified, can ever be, a nation; he was France.’ And so he was, but the trouble is the Tiger was also dead-set against many features of modern life, from political parties and ...”

“... On 22 October,​ Olivette Otele – a scholar of British and French colonialism who teaches at Bath Spa University – became the first black woman to be appointed to a chair in history at a UK university, and only the second black academic (the first was Hakim Adi, who teaches the history of Africa and the African diaspora at the University of Chichester ...”

“... Hegel’s reputation has been in decline since the end of the Second World War. He was a target of Karl Popper’s crude anti-communist polemics and Isaiah Berlin’s Oxfordian disdain. There has been a revival of interest in his metaphysics and theory of knowledge, but no comparable rediscovery of his political thought. From the 1960s onwards, Friedrich ...”

“... you mad. But Kathy Acker writes them and reads them. She has written into her fiction the hostile French writer Jean Genet, godfather of punk, and it seems she was a reader of Smollett when she was at school. She writes of an anxious and dangerous sexual existence beside which the violence of the 18th-century comic novel pales. Acker’s, as it happens, is ...”