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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... There’s a gauntness to his long, oval face, with its high forehead and downward-turned Walter Benjamin moustache, a settled sadness in his eyes; and though he is not tall, he is thin, and the overall impression is of the concentrated narrowness of a figure by Giacometti. He would look this way for the rest of his life.In a talk on Radio 4 called ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Frieda arrived in Turin, in 1919, they stayed a night at the house of an industrialist called Sir Walter Becker. This was Lawrence’s judgment, in a letter: The old knight and I had a sincere half-mocking argument, he for security and bank-balance and power, I for naked liberty. In the end, he rested safe on his bank-balance, I in my nakedness. We hated ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... resisting the rise of a common feeling of Indian nationhood, on suppressing the growth of a demos. Herbert Risley, the architect of the partition of Bengal, admitted frankly, though not publicly, that ‘one of our main objects is to split up and thereby weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule.’ The British looked kindly on the formation of the ...”

“... beers’ at a bar, in a conversation between Robert Swanson, a 29-year-old venture capitalist, and Herbert Boyer, a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco. Working with the Stanford geneticist Stanley Cohen, Boyer had helped to develop some elegant recombinant DNA technologies which immediately suggested enormous value to the pharmaceutical ...”

“... his understanding of Marxism. By the 1970s he is writing in New Society about Victor Serge and Walter Benjamin, independent Marxists who were opposed to the Party line or idiosyncratic in their interpretation of Marxist theory. Serge was a former anarchist who was soon expelled from the Party and ended up as a ‘left oppositionist’, disenchanted with ...”