Spying made easy

M.F. Perutz, 25 June 1987

Klaus Fuchs: The man who stole the atom bomb 
by Norman Moss.
Grafton, 216 pp., £12.95, April 1987, 0 246 13158 6
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... of theoretical physics at Bristol; after this he worked at Edinburgh with the German physicist Max Born, who was one of the founders of wave mechanics. In the spring of 1940 Fuchs was arrested, interned and later deported to Canada together with hundreds of other German and Austrian refugees, including myself. We were taken back to England and released in ...

Qui êtes-vous, Sir Moses?

C.R. Whittaker, 6 March 1986

Ancient History: Evidence and Models 
by M.I. Finley.
Chatto, 131 pp., £12.95, September 1985, 0 7011 3003 2
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... événementielle and German historicism as any Annaliste could demand. The final chapter on ‘Max Weber and the Greek City-State’ is one more demonstration of the abiding importance of Weber in the formation of Finley’s historical sensibility, while also, perhaps, a declaration of independence. The Annales historians gave respectability to the ...

Nicky, Willy and George

Christopher Clark: The Tsar, the Kaiser and the King, 22 October 2009

The Three Emperors: Three Cousins, Three Empires and the Road to World War One 
by Miranda Carter.
Fig Tree, 584 pp., £25, September 2009, 978 0 670 91556 9
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... still ‘deficient in even the most elementary subjects’, including spelling and grammar. Georg Ernst Hinzpeter, the man selected to oversee the education of the adolescent Wilhelm, was a far more impressive figure in intellectual terms, but his pedagogical regime, which aimed to break down the ‘crystal-hard egoism’ of the prince by relentlessly ...

Jade Goody Goes to Heaven

Laurence Scott: OK! and the uncanny, 26 March 2009

... that reality TV is as contrived as soap opera, we had always assumed that beneath Jade as the Max Clifford product, there was a flawed, deceptively charming, real woman of the same name. But now it seems that even her body, the real matter behind the gabby image, has been conscripted into this modern-day fable of ill-gotten fame and karmic revenge. We are ...

Hamlet and the Bicycle

Ian Buruma, 31 March 1988

The World of the Meiji Print: Impressions of a New Civilisation 
by Julia Meech-Pekarik.
Weatherhill, 259 pp., £27.50, October 1987, 0 8348 0209 0
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... Kawakami Otojiro. He had just completed a tour of Europe, where he had hoodwinked the critics – Max Beer-bohm among them – into believing that his renderings of plays like The Warrior and the Geisha (his wife played the geisha) were Kabuki masterpieces. Back in Tokyo, Kawakami’s Hamlet took the stage riding a bicycle. This, the Kabuki scholar Earle ...

A Gutter Subject

Neal Ascherson: Joachim Fest, 25 October 2012

Not Me: Memoirs of a German Childhood 
by Joachim Fest, translated by Martin Chalmers.
Atlantic, 316 pp., £20, August 2012, 978 1 84354 931 4
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... In 1986, as cultural editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he published the article by Ernst Nolte which was held to ‘relativise the Jewish Holocaust’ and touched off the Historikerstreit dispute over the uniqueness of Nazi crime. Fest was a handsome, restless, rather unhappy man. In postwar West Germany, he never fitted into any of the ...

Diary

Thomas Laqueur: My Dead Fathers, 7 September 2006

... a statement that they would have expected their parents, as well as strangers, to understand. Max Weber’s mother slapped his face when he came home from university with a duelling scar, taking it as a sign that he was gravitating away from her pietism and towards the physicality and boorishness of his father. I don’t think my father understood his ...

Theme-Park Prussia

David Blackbourn, 24 November 1994

Prussia: The Perversion of an Idea 
by Giles MacDonogh.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 456 pp., £20, July 1994, 1 85619 267 9
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... German history. Their mordant view of the Old Gang built on the insights of earlier critics like Max Weber, and of historians who had been marginalised in the Twenties and exiled under Hitler. Like many Anglo-Saxon writers of the period – Barrington Moore is a prime example – these scholars concluded that Nazism was the ultimate price paid for a stubborn ...

At MoMA

Hal Foster: Käthe Kollwitz’s Figures, 4 July 2024

... she preferred the fluidity of lithography, and in 1920, spurred by the work of the Expressionist Ernst Barlach and a commission to commemorate the murdered Karl Liebknecht, she turned to the dramatic contrasts of woodcuts. Yet the subjectivism of the Expressionist painters remained foreign to Kollwitz, and she was even more remote from the radicality of the ...

Unreasoning Vigour

Stefan Collini: Ian Watt, 9 May 2019

Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic 
by Marina MacKay.
Oxford, 228 pp., £25, November 2018, 978 0 19 882499 2
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... compound that, in its general or abstract form, owed most to German sociologists such as Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch, though its empirical uses had a longer pedigree in British social and economic thought. Defoe provided Watt’s first and most compelling exhibit here, as the creator of such uncompromising ...

On Saving the Warburg

Charles Hope, 4 December 2014

... time, Fritz Saxl, lost his professorship at the University of Hamburg, as did Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Cassirer, both of whom were closely associated with the institute. Various proposals for moving the library abroad failed because the destinations suggested – Jerusalem, Rome and Leiden – would only accept it as a gift, and this would have left the ...

Howitzers on the Hill

Neal Ascherson: ‘The Forty Days of Musa Dagh’, 8 March 2018

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh 
by Franz Werfel, translated by Geoffrey Dunlop, revised by James Reidel.
Penguin, 912 pp., £10.99, January 2018, 978 0 241 33286 3
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... still in the Habsburg Empire. As a young man publishing his first poems, he sat in cafés with Max Brod, Franz Kafka, Egon Erwin Kisch, Milena Jesenská and Willy Haas. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War, ending up in Vienna, where he graduated to the intellectual hothouse of the Café Central and, in 1915, was introduced to Alma ...

From Shtetl to Boulevard

Paul Keegan: Freud’s Mother, 5 October 2017

Freud: In His Time and Ours 
by Elisabeth Roudinesco, translated by Catherine Porter.
Harvard, 580 pp., £27.95, November 2016, 978 0 674 65956 8
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Freud: An Intellectual Biography 
by Joel Whitebook.
Cambridge, 484 pp., £30, February 2017, 978 0 521 86418 3
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... on a Case of Obsessive-Compulsive Neurosis’, Freud’s case history of the Rat Man (real name: Ernst Lanzer), there is an account of Lanzer’s attempts to repay a debt, or rather his attempt to describe his attempts to do so. While a reserve officer on military exercises, he loses his pince-nez and sends a telegram to his optician in Vienna. The ...

Don’t talk to pigeons

Ben Jackson: MI5 in WW1, 22 January 2015

MI5 in the Great War 
edited by Nigel West.
Biteback, 434 pp., £25, July 2014, 978 1 84954 670 6
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... discussion of dissolving Kell’s department. Helm’s case, along with the subsequent trials of Max Schultz and Armgaard Karl Graves, were also sufficient to secure a remarkable restriction of British civil liberties. In 1911 Churchill, then home secretary, began issuing general warrants to examine the entire correspondence of particular suspects ...

Bypass Variegated

Rosemary Hill: Osbert Lancaster, 21 January 2016

Osbert Lancaster’s Cartoons, Columns and Curlicues: ‘Pillar to Post’, ‘Homes Sweet Homes’, ‘Drayneflete Revealed’ 
by Osbert Lancaster.
Pimpernel, 304 pp., £40, October 2015, 978 1 910258 37 8
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... Homes, the first two of these reprinted volumes, appeared in 1938 and 1939 and were described by Ernst Gombrich as comprising ‘the best textbook of architecture ever published’. The foreword or ‘Order to View’ of Pillar to Post opens with the sentence: ‘This is not a textbook.’ Like all great satirists Lancaster had his finger on the pivotal ...