“... a lavish level of support (‘though I think that your yearly expenses should not exceed 10,000 marks’). Of course it was possible for beneficiaries of the capitalist system to be anti-capitalist in outlook (Lenin is the outstanding example). But there is little sign, either in Lukacs’s conduct or in his writings prior to 1919, of any principled ...”

“... his own clothes were, the funnier he was in someone else’s. In the Hitchcock film, the suit marks a turning-point: having been kidnapped, Grant (Roger Thornhill) is taken to a country house and interrogated by James Mason (Van Damme), who assumes Grant is one George Kaplan. After the bourbon and the car, Grant returns to the scene of the crime with the ...”

“... over northern Italy. The period is popularly remembered, if at all, for the ‘iconoclasm’ of Leo III (r. 717-41), which is in fact hardly attested by contemporary evidence, and Constantine V (r. 741-75), who convened a council to inveigh against idolatry but did little of the image-smashing of which he was retrospectively accused. The decision of the ...”

“... the ambivalence of Lenin’s response to Luxemburg. In Britain, the appearance of the letters marks a beginning. Verso is planning to issue her Complete Works in 14 volumes, making the entire body of writing available for the first time in English. The moment has clearly come for a return to Rosa Luxemburg. How far should revolutionary thinking be allowed ...”

“... into fugues of inspired counter-terror, then moving on. A suspicion lingers in the scorch marks that Home’s major project is Stewart Home: keeping his intelligence alive, gelling his retaliation in first. Home’s The Art Strike Papers are the ones you’ll find in Compendium Bookshop. The man who composes the post-humous testament controls ...”

“... Meeking, David Branch (whose elegant, Miesian case study-style house has now been demolished), Leo Rubinstein, Paul Tvrtkovic, Ray Smith and Ronald Coleman. Most of these were deadpan little houses, in brick with exposed concrete frames, often with small windows onto the street and much larger ones onto the gardens and courtyards.Clients included ...”

“... hand it over to a colleague by Latvian collaborators in Riga.In an unpublished memoir (now in the Leo Baeck Institute in London), my father’s cousin Hans Cramer writes that he began taking clandestine violin lessons while he was in hiding in Amsterdam. His teacher was an old, poor and ‘already a bit queer’ woman called Betty Francken-Schwabe, who had ...”

“... hasn’t. In part that’s because of his irreligion and liking for blasphemy, which Leo Strauss claimed to find shocking. But those who see him as proselytising from an atheistical pulpit misidentify as inverse religiosity what often seems more like simple je-m’en-foutisme. The demonisation of Machiavelli in the anglophone world has often been ...”

“... Next autumn​ marks the half-millennium since an event now so mythic that some have doubted it ever took place. If it did, the date was 31 October 1517. The main actor belonged to a religious Order known as the Hermits of Saint Augustine, Martin Luther by name, though he also tried out a hybrid Greek/Latin polish for his surname by dressing it up as ‘Eleutherius’, ‘the freed man ...”

“... that vast field of inquiry for which Watt’s very title, with or without sceptical quotation marks, remains the usual short-hand designation.’ From the 1980s onwards, attack was the dominant mode of engagement. Parodying the accumulating barrage, Lennard J. Davis wrote that Watt ‘made some really big mistakes’: He thought there was ...”

“... vision suddenly dissolves, Eve’s guide disappears and the dream ends. Perhaps this abrupt end marks the moment when Satan is apprehended by the angelic guards, or perhaps he has done enough: a seed of temptation has been planted. Paradise Lost is continually reworking elements of literary tradition, in large ways and small; among the virtues of Hardie’s ...”

“... her very occasionally urge on me the attractions of the writer’s life, instancing the novels of Leo Walmsley or Naomi Jacob – even, going up the scale a bit, the Brontë sisters, whom she has never actually read, but thinks of as local girls who have kicked over the traces and made good Down South. The novelist and ex-Bingley librarian John Braine of Room ...”

“... of attempting to detain life, the vanity of hanging onto what is gone, the beauty of the marks of time’. There is no sense of loss, of regret, of a past world to which Rodney truly belongs and which we can recover: only an image, abstracted from our own sense of time past and suspended now in the present, like a dream image whose connection to us ...”

“... of important differences. We may note that Freud doesn’t put ‘conviction’ between quotation-marks, and that the ‘desire’ to act as devil’s advocate, a very interesting analytic diagnosis, is Reddick’s addition. What we can’t get, and what belongs to what I was describing as critical description rather than translation, is the discreet effect ...”

“... the lynchpin of his exhibit at the Salon, had turned out to be unfinishable in the time remaining. Leo Stein said later that Matisse dared come only once to the Salon d’Automne to see his painting in situ, for fear of scoffers, and that Madame Matisse never came at all. Denis was not the only fellow-artist to join the hue and cry. The German painter Hans ...”