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“... sociologist quoted by Friedman said of his students that ‘you can’t always be sure they’ve read Shakespeare, but you know they’ve read Erikson.’ The last quarter-century after that was, inevitably, a period of decline. Though apparently quite a modest man, once he had attained the position of sage his ideas grew ...”

“... men who has ever lived. He could paint, draw and write almost as well as he could compose. He read Homer in Greek and spoke half a dozen other languages. He had a curatorial flair, playing a large part in the rescue of Bach’s music from oblivion, as well as Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony, and as a conductor he gave historically informed ...”

“... Though he does not use the same terms, his interrogations seem to me to be cousin to those of Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities and Jacqueline Rose in State of Fantasy: how are Arab communities and nations imagined? What are the fantasies that are constitutive of their different political and social identities? And in the shadows hovers the great ...”

“... displays a happy balance between scholarship and readability. Its directness shows that Bartlett read Augustine in Latin (cur et mortui tanta possunt?) – the published translations are much wordier. Bartlett identifies the three essentials for a saint cult as ‘name, body, text’. Names might be confused and texts could be commissioned, but a body, or at ...”

“... in the Suffolk volumes – and the rest of the BoE – is hard to gauge, but much of what you read about you can’t easily see. The gatehouse to what was once Butley Priory is one example. The guide doesn’t tell you that it can be rented: it sleeps 11 and costs £900 a night (the pictures on the priory’s website show interiors of light stone and ...”

“... much of the USSR’s history. But we should bear in mind, to paraphrase the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, that the last thing a talking fish would be likely to mention is the water in which it swims. A particularly striking example of Bergman’s tendency to discount the Soviet context appears in his otherwise insightful analysis of Sakharov’s Reflections ...”

“... the non-West is, or at least was, nicely encompassed by ‘national’, in Benedict Anderson’s sense of the word. The ‘book’ has been a crucial element in the unfolding of that history; after the banning of The Satanic Verses, and the book-burnings and desecrations that followed, at the hands of fundamentalists of all ...”

“... subtlety is needed to decode the image, since a closer look shows the teeth inside the gash read simply ‘Nationalism’. But in case anyone failed to register that, the whole image was crowned with a title in 72-point scarlet lettering: ‘OLD DEMON’. It wasn’t an in-depth retrospect – it hardly could have been at that date – more an ...”

“... was first made, on the publication of Chatterjee’s first novel, Chatterjee claimed he’d never read Scott. Even if he had, to call him the ‘Walter Scott of Bengal’ is subtly different from, say, Barthes remarking, ‘Gide was another Montaigne,’ where a continuity is being established, a lineage being traced. In the phrase that describes ...”

“... quite different figures in the Western academy can claim the credit for this: Clifford Geertz, Benedict Anderson and James C. Scott. Geertz, one of whose many talents was for the writing of superbly perfidious book reviews, was the master of the catchy phrase: he gave us ‘theatre state’, ‘agricultural involution’ and quite a few others, which then ...”

“... modern national histories since its publication thirty years ago. Its long shadow falls even on Benedict Anderson’s account of the way print capitalism helped create the ‘imagined communities’ that are today’s nation-states. No such master account has yet been written of the modern Indian nation-state, partly because historians of the subcontinent ...”

“... time, achieved a kind of reality consistent with its ambitions, in what might – borrowing from Benedict Anderson – be thought of as its ‘Imagined Territories’. Israel’s insistence on building in the Occupied Territories forced it to take into account the existence of Palestinian villages and roads but as Weizman shows, Israeli ‘architects’ had ...”

“... rose, when it was his habit to give her improving books rather than romantic ones, books she never read although she appreciated the elegant calligraphy of his inscriptions on the title pages. She’s not impressed by the rose, understanding that true love isn’t about such things but about ‘going to work every day and never once complaining about teaching ...”

“... with dreams the tendency to be either beyond comprehension or all too obvious in meaning. When we read that in January 1818 two women were admitted separately to Charenton ‘entirely deranged’ by the price of bread and the fear that they could no longer feed their children, the connection between reality and delusion comes ready-made. At other times the ...”

“... Joseph, the pious Bavarian, who had grown up to become Cardinal Ratzinger and then Pope Benedict XVI, appalled the Muslim world and many liberal Catholics by quoting a Byzantine emperor’s insults to the Prophet Muhammad. The Danzig lad, who had become Germany’s best-known writer and a Nobel Prize winner, the scourge of those who kept quiet about ...”