“... appeared confused, irritated or bored by him, classic reactions of age to the heroes of youth. Robert Carringer’s sharp-eyed, dispassionate post-mortem on what actually happened in the making of Kane, and Barbara Leaming’s almost embarrassingly intimate monitoring of the variations in the maker’s oft-told tales during what turned out to be the last ...”

“... to him. This enthralling new account of Sorge, by the veteran British journalist and old Asia hand Robert Whymant, confirms what I had long suspected: Sorge and Philby were psychic twins, two textbook examples of the rare species we might call Homo undercoverus – those who find the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not (Sorge ...”

“... from Tocqueville-in particular, that it was not enough to repent of the misdeeds of the Third Reich, that democracy needed ‘the antagonism of opinions’ more than the concerted mouthing of Cold War platitudes which conservative politicians preferred. In post-war France, Raymond Aron saw Tocqueville as the great counter-weight to Marx. David Riesman’s ...”

“... sort of affair, quite often fails to live up to our expectations of it, as when it allowed Robert Maxwell to slip quietly into the ocean rather than ending up in the dock. Austen or Dickens would never have tolerated such a botched finale. For the Lukácsian case about realism, technique is an optional extra, like having a stereo or a sunroof in your ...”

“... and behaviour at every stage of the Second World War, using above all the Meldungen aus dem Reich, the regular confidential reports on civilian morale made by SS Security Service and local and regional government officials, together with diaries and correspondence, especially field-post letters to and from soldiers at the front, to chart the diverse and ...”

“... Then he provides an account of liberal Protestantism in Germany from about 1800 to the Third Reich. The ‘stillborn god’ of his title is the result of the liberal Protestant effort to provide a god who could do something other than sanctify the state. The failure to do this paved the way for the worst state tyrannies, for ‘the messiah of 1917’ and ...”

“... Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one type of American adolescent, who has discovered that machine civilisation has no interest in his having read Blake’). Riding ...”

“... had treated as a purely totalitarian phenomenon) seemed ripe for comparative treatment. In 1997, Robert Gellately and I edited a comparative volume called Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History 1789-1989. This was around the time of the attempted impeachment of President Clinton, which featured a denunciation of Monica Lewinsky by her ...”

“... plans for a new show set in an alternative reality, in which the Confederate South, led by General Robert E. Lee, has successfully seceded from the Union. D.B. Weiss, one of the producers of Confederate, explained the thinking behind the series: ‘What would the world have looked like if Lee had sacked DC, if the South had won – that just always fascinated ...”

“... work of John Cage and Cornelius Cardew was followed by Morton Feldman and La Monte Young, Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Phillips also alerted Eno to the untapped potential of tape recorders, and impressed him with a lecture using random cards and slides.All these things that don’t belong together, jumbled up as in a collage or a dream: John Cage, Jimi ...”

“... to the court, spent the war in occupied Paris managing French companies and banks for the Third Reich; after the war, he married Adenauer’s niece, and acted as defence lawyer for the Waffen SS charged with responsibility for the massacre of the occupants of the French village of Oradour. The other advocate-general, Maurice Lagrange, was a senior ...”

“... again as a world power. Henry Stimson, Roosevelt’s war secretary, took a different view. So did Robert Jackson, a Supreme Court justice, though Jackson was clear that ‘you must put no man on trial under forms of a judicial proceeding if you are not willing to see him freed if not proven guilty … the world yields no respect for courts that are organised ...”

“... Motherwell), Cage was well placed to soak up ideas. He played chess with Duchamp, and befriended Robert Rauschenberg, whose notorious White Paintings – a series of rectangular canvasses painted plain white – have often been seen as the visual counterpart to 4’33”. Cage recognised that the ‘emptiness’ of Rauschenberg’s paintings was no such ...”

“... exploitation deprived France of resources in order to sustain the domestic economy of the Third Reich. The petrol supply had fallen to 8 per cent of its prewar levels by 1943, while the British blockade reduced grain supplies by 50 per cent between 1938 and 1940 and the drafting of farm workers to forced labour in Germany further reduced food supplies. The ...”

“... and in books and articles by writers with dubious credentials, such as Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and ‘Enemies of the State’, written by one of the NRA’s lawyers – the argument is made, over and over again, that gun registries are the golden thread connecting all genocidaires: ‘Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Idi ...”