“... It was in this very lack of developed ideas that, when it reached the West, its limitation lay. ‘Sadly,’ Ghervas writes, ‘the spirit of enlarged Europe was never able to revive the postwar European spirit.’ Nor did it reach the western Balkans. There its opposite prevailed, the Spirit of Lyssa, goddess of anger, as Yugoslavia broke up and its ...”

“... Saint-Alban had become a sanctuary for partisans and left-wing intellectuals, including the poet Paul Eluard and the historian of science Georges Canguilhem. Tosquelles pioneered ‘institutional’ or ‘social’ therapy, which tried to turn the hospital into a recognisable microcosm of the world outside. The idea underlying social therapy – and ...”

“... had found a job which involved driving. It was always a story about permission or control that lay within the purview of somebody else. In America, individualism itself was over time accommodated to the corporate age, an effort captured very naturally in Herbert Hoover’s 1922 treatise, American Individualism. In no time at all Emerson’s ‘natural ...”

“... anniversary of Chesterton’s death, Cardinal Emmett Carter described him as one of the ‘holy lay persons’ who have exercised a prophetic role within the Church and the world. Though the cardinal was hesitant, the Chesterton Review wondered whether there might be grounds for canonisation, given the ‘special integrity and blamelessness about him, a ...”

“... Pierre Louÿs, Mata Hari and Comte Robert de Montesquiou, to Gide, Colette, Rémy de Gourmont, Paul Valéry, Sacha Guitry, Salomon Reinach and the buxom brunette diva Emma Calvé. (It was de Gourmont who nicknamed Barney ‘L’Amazone’, the monicker under which she would publish three books of flowery autobiographical pensées.) She also bagged the ...”

“... until the century’s second great catastrophe. This is not the common view. The title alone of Paul Fussell’s enormously influential The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), for example, proclaims the contrary. So does the concluding line – ‘Never such innocence again’ – of Philip Larkin’s 1960 poem ‘MCMXIV’, invoking the summer haze, the ...”

“... the March, no more than the typical reader of contemporary newspapers, and his immediate interest lay elsewhere. He had come to work in the library at Rimini, which was noted for its trove of manuscripts and archival material relating to Sigismondo Malatesta, who had ruled the city from 1430 to 1468 and sponsored the reconstruction of the church of San ...”

“... of whether (and with whom) they should be allowed to have children. His well-intentioned use of ‘lay analysts’ lacking a medical degree (as was the case with Fromm) degenerated into a system of dangling traineeships in front of favoured followers with no psychiatric knowledge and no understanding of the ethical dimensions of what they were being taught to ...”

“... nationalists during the independence struggle. A separate French protest was signed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Aragon.The king and his advisers took the view that Morocco must forge its own post-independence path. Why should left-leaning states in the Third World and ex-colonial powers, harping on the rights they had denied in the past, tell Hassan ...”

“... in men in question???’ I wrote shriekingly in the margin. A few months​ later she married Paul Suttman, a sculptor so devoted to aesthetics that he told Lucia she was asymmetrical the first time she undressed for him. (She was diagnosed with scoliosis at the age of ten.) He chose forks with only two tines, ‘so it was difficult to eat ...”

“... Yeltsin. The meetings went on like this for several days. We talked about Deconstruction, about Paul de Man, about ideological subversion and containment, about principles of selection and rejection, about the fortunes of systematic Marxist literary criticism, and so forth. There were some moments of illumination, but often the American editors seemed to be ...”

“... that case with respect to the development of nuclear weapons. Indeed the subject seems designed to lay bare the contradictions at the core of Enlightenment culture by revealing them at work in the subculture of professional physicists bent to the needs of government power. Few social laboratories could more clearly reveal the tensions between chauvinist ...”

“... and each in his own way tries to deal with. Unlike the novel, however (and like Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or Absalom, Absalom!), the movie gives the characters not just sentiments and opinions but philosophies of life. These mostly unschooled, regionally accented, often ungrammatical and inconsistent philosophies, which some critics snobbishly belittle, are ...”

“... teach at the New School for Social Research in New York. In March 1941, he boarded the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle along with 350 other ‘undesirables’, among them Victor Serge, who described the ship as ‘a kind of floating concentration camp’. Lévi-Strauss found the ascetic Serge unapproachable, but while docked in Casablanca he struck up a lasting ...”

“... island and Geffen’s yacht and Tahiti, his design for tearing up the Chicago Olmsted Park to lay down the Obama Presidential Library, which will host a yoga centre – these things are noticed in the right-wing press and the gutter Twittersphere. They make Obama out to be one more liberal hypocrite; whereas with Trump the almost-avowed corruption adds to ...”