“... friend Ben Gurion: ‘The Germans have summed up their own experience in the bitter phrase “Mann kann sich totseigen!” — you can triumph yourself to death. This is what the Israelis have been doing. They have bitten off much more than they can swallow.’ Five hundred courageous Israelis have sent a letter to Western embassies calling for sanctions ...”

“... from a list which includes Dickens, Homer, Dante, Rousseau, Goethe, Woolf, Constant, Balzac, Mann and Tolstoy: so it is as well that he is being taken care of ...”

“... in March he went on to Coleridge, Chaucer, Fielding and Petronius, and then had a go at Proust, Mann, Boswell and David Hume. He took a turn through French literature then doubled back to the English Romantics. He read Cicero and Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, Mikhail ...”

“... history (Bloch, Braudel, Hobsbawm, Needham, Elliott), sociology (Mosca, Pareto, Weber, Simmel, Mann), anthropology (Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard) or literary studies (Bakhtin, de Man, Barthes). All these foundational figures are European. The grand American exception is Chomsky, who revolutionised the study of ...”

“... pouncing upon the first occasion helpfully to get at me’. Both James in his stories and Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain (1924) understood the power which ghosts and séance scenes held in the imaginations of their readers. During the First World War, as Maddox says, ‘grieving millions turned to the spiritualist movement, searching for messages from ...”

“... for European refugees and American artists who gathered at her Sunday afternoon salon. Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, W.H. Auden, Sergei Eisenstein, Hanns Eisler, Arnold Schoenberg, Lionel Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht rubbed shoulders with Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx ...”

“... drew a different response: he was sure he could make something better. For Kubrick (according to Michael Herr, his friend and collaborator on the screenplay of Full Metal Jacket), ‘there was definitely such a thing as a bad movie, but there was no movie not worth seeing.’ He told Herr in an exuberant moment that The Godfather must be the greatest movie ...”

“... in 1974 – followed a year later by a book-length interview with the American neoconservative Michael Ledeen, subsequently prominent in the Iran-Contra affair – that this huge enterprise had a major impact in the public sphere, attracting a barrage of criticism on the left as a rehabilitation of Fascism. By the time his fifth volume came out, in the ...”

“... now ambulance men ban kiss of life’; ‘Policeman flees Aids victim.’ In the early days, Michael Adler of Middlesex Hospital remembered, it was very difficult to get them hospitalised, it was very difficult to get patients treated as normal human beings. People were frightened, they thought it was contagious, the patients had to be put in side ...”

“... perceived as such on all sides – was the future of national identity. The conservatives Michael Stürmer and Andreas Hillgruber argued, in effect, that the crimes of the Third Reich did not cancel the traditional and fateful position of Germany in the centre of the Continent. The most historically discontinuous national identity in Europe was still ...”

“... medical industries. The US has provided some of the WHO’s most dynamic figures, notably Jonathan Mann, who led the organisation’s response to the spread of Aids in the 1980s. In narrative fiction and non-fiction, a stock figure has emerged: the brave, principled, maverick American researcher who leaves the safety of the homeland to plunge into the world of ...”

“... commended Moravia and Malaparte, and was respectful of Aldanov and Malraux. Critical of Sartre and Mann, cool about Camus and Pasternak, he warmed to Queneau. These​ were the novels of others. It is in his own that the effect of Powell’s personal culture becomes salient. More real persons are referred to in A la recherche than there are characters: on a ...”

“... you no longer feel like that – because you evidently did feel so at one time – about Michael Fried?Well, one is avid for heroes when one’s young; especially among one’s contemporaries. Everybody has memories of that. Somebody like Francis Hope, for example, who died young in an aircrash, used to dazzle me with his cleverness. He’d been to a ...”