“... unromantic Hooper, who nevertheless seems all set to inherit the earth; but then on the last page Charles thinks of the light burning in the sanctuary of Brideshead chapel, ‘the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs’ and which remains ‘burning anew among the old stones’. So the closing note is hopeful if unaccompanied. The Sword of Honour ...”

“... we move: from Paolo Sarpi through Augustine, Cicero, Vasari, Winckelmann, Flaxman, Hegel, Heine, Baudelaire, Semper, Scott, Riegl, Feyerabend, Simone Weil and Adorno, ending with Roberto Longhi. In another, from Viktor Shklovsky through Tolstoy, Marcus Aurelius and popular riddles of Roman times, Antonio de Guevara and the transmission of medieval tales to ...”

“... of English Poets”!’ he wrote to Emily Hale in February 1933, halfway through his year as Charles Eliot Norton professor at Harvard. The lecture included the following considerations (transcribed by his brother Henry):The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don’t want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but which yet ...”

“... to think deeply about 19th-century London without Dickens or 19th-century Paris without Balzac or Baudelaire. That said, Levi’s claims for his subject are, relatively speaking, modest. In his writing much of what we take to be the uniqueness of the ‘Holocaust’, the essence of its cosmic, trans-historical, metaphysical portent, is missing. He has no ...”

“... might have pointed out that this doesn’t have a lot in common with his title either. Goethe and Baudelaire, meanwhile, have taken the place of Kandinsky and Mann, in what could be seen as upwardly mobile cultural paraphrase. The article is summarised as ‘Mr Tarnopol is considered by Dr Spielvogel to be among the nation’s top young narcissists in the ...”