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“... craft? The answer is, scarcely at all. The last few pages of his text broach it, then peter out. Causes in The Historian’s Craft are a bit like classes in Marx’s Capital, a word followed by … This could be because the text, written in very difficult conditions during the war, is unfinished. But there are reasons for thinking that even had it ...”

“... out an obnoxious member, they did not know how to do it. They sent the future Chief Rabbi, Saul Levi Mortiera, to get the advice of Venetian rabbis, who gave him the form of words. It appears that during the 17th century over two hundred and eighty members were excommunicated from the Amsterdam Spanish and Portuguese Jewish community, for non-payment of ...”

“... fallacy Cosima supported from the other side, through her belief that a Jewish conductor (Hermann Levi) could not penetrate the sacred mystery? On the other hand, if we aren’t disturbed, what becomes of Wagner’s idealistic belief that a ‘true’ response to great music conditions man’s moral being? These problems aren’t equally important, of ...”

“... Jewish musicians who have conducted, sung, played, directed or designed the operas, from Hermann Levi to Barenboim, Levine and Solti, they are by implication either dupes or complicit scoundrels. ‘The questions of Wagner’s antisemitism and Hitler’s exploitation of it are fundamental,’ Rose writes, ‘but what is ultimately at stake in banning Wagner ...”

“... consciousness of the post-Revolutionary ‘new man’. An article by Richard Greeman – who, with Peter Sedgwick, began the Serge revival by translating some of his work during the 1960s, and is preparing a biography of his own – locates Serge’s literary Damascus in two experiences of death, one political, the other physical, that led to something like a ...”

“... school I was surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the ...”

“... together. Elena was now Helen, Mummy not Mami; Papa became Daddy; the boys were still Donald and Peter, of course, but they had far fewer words at their disposal by which to express themselves. They were now British – British refugees, to be exact – not just because their identity documents said so, but because their survival depended on it. And thus ...”

“... Churchill’s heroic struggle or basking in its post-war glorification. Such ‘shame’, as Primo Levi calls the malaise felt by survivors of imprisonment, does not parade itself. There are political reasons, too, why the resistance hasn’t been chronicled more thoroughly – Bunting’s account is itself far from complete or accurate – and why there has ...”

“... Keith Thomas puts it, ‘changing gestural codes offer a key to changing social relationships.’ Peter Burke points out that the two historians who have done most to encourage this view are Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault. In The Civilising Process, first published in 1939, Elias argued that a rising European bourgeoisie sought to discipline itself by a ...”

“... assembled a team of collaborators whose views were shaped by an evolving canon that included Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and, most significant of all, the work of Erving Goffman, which Ongaro translated for an Italian edition. In 1961, too, Goffman published ...”

“... At moments like this, the career charted by these essays is like something from the brain of Peter York, an intellectual Style Wars. Whether or not you can translate ‘the specificity ...’ into ‘the distinctive thing ...’ is a vexing question, and one on which the newness of theory in part hinges. For theory certainly has a new vocabulary, but ...”

“... of the remote south did have one or two positive consequences for Italian literature. Carlo Levi wrote Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli, while Moravia, Morante, Malaparte and Natalia Ginzburg all used their experiences of exile in their fiction. Not so Pavese; having arrived on the south coast of Calabria in August, he opens his diary on 6 October: That ...”

“... gentleman who told Bathurst about his reluctant withdrawal from the pleasures of life was Sir Peter de la Billière, commander-in-chief of British forces during the first Gulf War, whose deafening began when he was still in his twenties (he was born in 1934). He was downgraded on the basis of his poor hearing at the age of 36, but appealed and was ...”

“... is unfavourably impressed with her high-pitched voice. Sontag visits Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky in their hotel on rue Gît-le-Coeur; years later she will berate herself for namedropping the connection (‘how many times did I talk about Allen Ginsberg last year?’). Sontag goes to her first Paris party, at the home of the philosopher Jean ...”

“... also Albert Camus’s ‘The New Mediterranean Culture’: A Text and it Contexts by Neil Foxlee (Peter Lang, 2010) and We are no longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria by Allison Drew (Manchester, 2014).  Conor Cruise O’Brien’s critique of Camus was the first title in the Fontana Modern Masters series, edited by Frank Kermode. Many of ...”