“... m the Air). Bloch’s passion for aerial and low life excursions was one of his many bonds with Walter Benjamin, the outstanding critical mind among his younger German contemporaries and, like Klemperer, an early admirer of Geist der Utopie. It was surely thanks to Bloch and his essay on Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann – written for the 1930 Kroll Opera ...”

“... pinned to a cushion which Merula, his widow, had embroidered years ago with a flowing tapestry of Walter, A.G.’s favourite dog. Once when A.G. was appearing in the West End Walter was run over by a milk-float and slightly injured. The dog was so loved that this news had to be kept from Alec lest he be unable to take the ...”

“... his understanding of Marxism. By the 1970s he is writing in New Society about Victor Serge and Walter Benjamin, independent Marxists who were opposed to the Party line or idiosyncratic in their interpretation of Marxist theory. Serge was a former anarchist who was soon expelled from the Party and ended up as a ‘left oppositionist’, disenchanted with ...”

“... in the Twenties, when Roth started writing them, Alfred Polgar was the most celebrated exponent. Walter Benjamin called Polgar ‘the German master of the small form’. In 1935, writing in honour of Polgar’s 60th birthday, Roth said that he considered himself Polgar’s pupil: ‘He polishes the ordinary until it becomes extraordinary ... I have learned ...”

“... So were three of his children: Erika (also just most of the time; she made an exception for Bruno Walter, among others), Klaus and Golo. Suicide was a family theme too. Both of Thomas Mann’s sisters committed suicide, as did his sons Klaus and Michael, as did the second wife of his brother Heinrich. Also, gerontophilia. Bruno ...”

“... recur throughout A la recherche), engages the nature of his prose as well as his sentiments; as Walter Benjamin said, in one of the finest essays ever written on the novel, Proust’s language is inseparable from his ‘intransigent French spirit’. It is a language with roots reaching deep into the history of French prose from Montaigne through ...”

“... as the more accurate designation of the events; and he rejects the term ‘Holocaust’ (as Walter Laqueur did before him), a word that has petrified into an empty cliché since it was given currency by an American television show. What was done to the Jews, Mayer rightly observes, has nothing to do with the word’s traditional meaning: they were not ...”

“... a security guard pried his fingers from the throat of his fiancée, Karla Jensen – and Carolyn Strauss, Netflix launched its plan to take over television. That same year broadband reached more than half of American households. Reed Hastings, who made three-quarters of a billion dollars selling a software startup when he was 35 and went on to make Netflix a ...”

“... terms as he had originally envisaged, the Ordo-liberals of Freiburg, whose leading thinkers were Walter Eucken, Wilhelm Röpke and Alfred Müller-Armack. Lacking Hayek’s intransigent radicalism, they were close to Ludwig Erhard, the reputed architect of the postwar German miracle, and thereby had more real influence in the early days of the Common ...”

“... against Berlusconi followed. Though not as damaging as the debacle which soon engulfed Dominique Strauss-Kahn, president of the IMF and front-runner for the French presidency, Berlusconi was weakened by the degradation of his image. But for the time being he survived. A more serious threat to his position came from another direction. Out of ...”