“... Wagner proleptically with the Holocaust is to go much further than Achebe, and further even than Walter Benjamin, for whom every document of civilisation was also a document of barbarism. It is to amputate unseemly and horrible experiences altogether from the realm of the human, and as such is a view incapable of development, argument or reconciliation.I ...”

“... Some had military experience, though it wasn’t always the useful kind: ‘Manchester volunteer Walter Greenhalgh, for example, had served in the Territorial Army, but had done so as a drummer and the value of his expertise was probably limited.’ Many were veterans of the 1931 naval mutiny at Invergordon, or the hunger marches of the early 1930s, or the ...”

“... could be something private, hidden in a locket worn next to your heart. In his autobiography, Lord Herbert of Cherbury recounts how his admirer, Lady Ayres, had a full-size portrait of him ‘contracted into little form’, and wore it round her neck ‘so low that she hid it under her breasts’. Trouble ensued when her husband found her lying in ...”

“... interested in Taylor’s more orthodox poems, which he valued, as would any good friend of Sir Walter Scott, as a source of quaint details about everyday life in Jacobean London. Malcolm’s proposal of an unbroken, overarching historical trajectory of nonsense stretching from the Renaissance to the Victorians looks equally shaky in the other ...”

“... foremost, he was committed to modern architecture, though not strictly to the rationalist canon of Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe laid down by first-generation historians such as Pevsner, Sigfried Giedion, and Henry-Russell Hitchcock (Pevsner published Pioneers of the Modern Movement in 1936; Giedion Space, Time and Architecture in ...”

“... the Bibescus. A Frenchified descendant of an old princely family, Antoine Bibescu had married Herbert Asquith’s daughter, Elisabeth. Asquith, it seems, had taken the alliance badly. ‘For him,’ Bibescu remarked, ‘it was as if she had married a Chinaman.’ The prince, Sebastian adds, felt the same about Romanian society. Eccentric, a bit ...”

“... to gangland New York, Xenophon’s story embedded itself in popular consciousness through Walter Hill’s 1979 punk movie, The Warriors. One incident in particular captures readers’ imaginations: the shout of ‘Thalatta! Thalatta!’ (‘The sea! The sea!’) uttered by the Greeks as they catch sight of the Black Sea from Mount Theches (eagerly ...”

“... there had been a heated debate in Encounter between Clifford Geertz and the Swiss journalist Herbert Lüthy. It took place between late 1965 and early 1966, when communists and their sympathisers were being massacred in Indonesia after the attempted coup of 1965. Lüthy had started it by writing an essay on the ‘irrationality’ of Indonesian political ...”

“... structuralism, and not only because Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss worked together; Walter Benjamin’s thinking was often, perhaps always, inseparable from the turns his language took. Even the austere Adorno said that one could ‘hardly speak of aesthetic matters unaesthetically, devoid of resemblance to the subject matter’. I don’t think ...”

“... Baudrillard admits to being indebted, the thinking particularly of the Frankfurt School and of Walter Benjamin. America, both the place and the book as he has conceived them, is invented to demonstrate that any theories that have not evolved as Baudrillard’s have done are now, no less than persons and people, an incumbrance. In several previous works, a ...”

“... appearing again and again as touchstones, and he was cautionary in response to his friend Walter Benjamin’s views on the utopian potential to be found in cinema, radio and advertising. In a letter he wrote to Benjamin in August 1936, Adorno defines his own position as being where the extremes of art – the very lowest, the very highest ...”

“... established a unique status as a source on how Britain is actually governed, a century after Walter Bagehot’s classic celebration of the British constitution. The Backbench Diaries might well have borrowed a title from another famous diarist and been called My Apprenticeship. We see here the origins of Crossman’s subsequent enterprise. ‘I do happen ...”

“... that threatened to leave the elderly more vulnerable. Early 20th-century progressives such as Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann championed the cult of youth and the dismantling of established traditions and institutions. Under this regime the old could be seen as embodying past failure – symbols of what needed to be ...”

“... the early 1900s had come to regard the 19th-century promise of inevitable progress as empty or, as Walter Benjamin saw it, catastrophic. Facing total war, they insisted that action was essential to forestall disaster. As Marx and Engels had warned in the Communist Manifesto, the fight between the oppressor and the oppressed would end ‘either in a ...”

“... of Uruk is not out of place in the company of the more traditional exemplars with whom Zbigniew Herbert sets him: Go where those others went to the dark boundary for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize ... go upright among those who are on their knees among those with their backs turned and those                     toppled ...”