“... terrible simplificateur, a Hitler writ small. Kater also introduces us to travelling salesman Paul Gillgasch, who struggled to pay his district party’s telephone bills from the sale of razor blades and portraits of the Führer. This is the familiar world of the Spiesser. But Kater also shows that, especially in the years 1930-33, the Nazis started to ...”

“... on modern art. One is the earnest social aspirations and concern for the environment which lay behind such developments as Land art, Performance art, Living sculpture, Body art and Community art. Kramer is unimpressed by Robert Smithson’s ‘ambition ... to break with the conventions of studio production and museum exhibitions in order to create an ...”

“... she goes to her window: She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving – perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the ...”

“... The work of Alphonse Bertillon, a police official working in Paris from the 1880s onwards, helped lay the ground for modern FRT. Unlike the eugenicist Francis Galton or the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who believed it was possible to read a person’s criminal type off his face, Bertillon was mundanely preoccupied with identifying criminals by recording ...”

“... liberal institutions’? This would only happen if the pope agreed to make concessions. But herein lay the problem: Pius’s commitment to reform had always been tightly circumscribed and the trauma of his flight into exile had hardened his politics and his personality. With extraordinary stubbornness he insisted that his restoration must be a restoration in ...”

“... for their carers. The funding came from central government, but responsibility for the centres lay with local authorities. I have fond memories of the centres, which among other things were a welcome relief from the isolation you can feel when caring for small children at home. Parents would chat among themselves while the children got to charge around on ...”

“... sons and the mother in iconographical terms remarkably close to those prevailing in Catholic or lay families of the period. France may have been superficially divided, but it was, without knowing it, an anthropological whole united at the level of its middle classes by the shared outlook of its bourgeois families. Young Léon attended the Ecole ...”

“... explained, ‘could not have answered the purpose of a habitable world’. The answer, in fact, lay in the soil, so necessary for the growth of plants. But the same processes of erosion which produced soil from mountains would in time destroy the land. Accordingly, if the world was the work of ‘infinite power and wisdom’ there had to be restorative ...”

“... about American affairs for NOW which East Coast radicals, like Dwight Macdonald and Paul Goodman, were always assuring me should be disregarded as entirely mythomaniacal; they were nevertheless extremely entertaining. Reading his poems at the same time as his personal letters and his scurrilous public letters, I soon developed the image of a ...”

“... by a lot of in-group facetiousness at the start. Although G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica still lay four years in the future, Russell had available to him the typescript of some lectures that Moore had given in London during the previous year on ‘The Elements of Ethics’. In his paper he takes issue with Moore’s view that there can be good or bad ...”

“... a stable majority for integration. The appearance of outside visitors, most notably Pope John Paul in late 1989, gave the East Timorese the sense that they had not been forgotten by the outside world, and increasingly they found opportunities to communicate with it. For the first time they began to organise demonstrations for independence, which, though ...”

“... preferred today. Enough material there for a whole case-history. Notwithstanding the title of Paul Alexander Juutilainen’s recent film docubiog about Marcuse, Herbert the Hippopotamus, the slack-sphinctered pachyderm in LaRouche’s first sentence refers not to Marcuse, late consort of Korsch, Davis and the Weathermen, nor even to Lyndon Jr’s own ...”

“... Tory venom. It’s worth considering what kind of cultural authority this type of writing can lay claim to these days. It self-consciously repudiates the credentials of academic scholarship; it disparages the narrow technical expertise of the policy wonk; it cannot rest on the standing of achievement as a politician or novelist. In other words, it has ...”

“... to an invisible art manifestation: Lost Memories by Emma Matthews. ‘Very elegant, very Paul Klee,’ the punters say. Rusting English metal, from somewhere down the A13, near Rainham Marshes, rendered as a grid of delicately balanced reds and pinks, with just enough green to cancel the headache. This, so often, is how it works; synergy, they call ...”

“... Spring ends with the miracle of a river gushing from the place where the murdered girl’s body lay, while Breaking the Waves culminates in the miracle of celestial bells, ringing out for the innocence of Bess. Yet in Bergman’s film, sexual assault and murder take place in a single scene; in Breaking the Waves Bess offers herself up time and time ...”