“... 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 ...”

“... billed as ‘the laugh sensation of two continents’ at the Coconut Grove in Miami: the columnist Walter Winchell called it ‘vulgar’ and Bert Lahr, who played Estragon, got a letter asking what a star of The Wizard of Oz was doing ‘in a play which is communistic, atheistic and existential’. ‘This Miami fiasco does not distress me in the smallest ...”

“... birth to a son, David. She studies for masters’ degrees in literature and philosophy at Harvard. Herbert Marcuse boards in their house. The tone is one of new maturity in a high-toned world, but there are also floods of tears, feelings of imprisonment, the need to die or leave. There isn’t much room for the complex, human Philip Rieff. He was famous in his ...”

“... copy ‘in the British Museum’, to remind his brother of the ‘Genealogy of the Eliot Family by Walter Graeme Eliot of New York’ – a Who’s Who of Eliots of which their father had possessed ‘two copies’. He then expounded on various Eliots, reminding Henry that ‘Our people, you remember, went to [East] Coker, near Yeovil in Somerset.’ This ...”

“... Dog Years (1963). This is the story (among a great many other things) of the friendship between Walter Matern, the son of a German miller from the Danzig hinterland, and the half-Jewish Eddi Amsel, alias Haseloff, alias Brauxell (in several different spellings). The account of three decades – from 1925 to the mid-Fifties – is presented by various ...”

“... across South African campuses in 2015, Mbembe said that he often returned to a 1969 debate between Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno to reflect on the way intellectuals might ‘bear witness to the main events of [our] time’. As public discontent with post-apartheid South Africa spilled over from the townships into the universities, some faculty were ...”

“... a stepmother out of a fairy story: pious, chapel-going and a hypocrite who beat the youngest boys, Walter and George, and then told lies about them to her new husband so that when he came home from work he gave them the strap all over again. The two elder boys were old enough to escape the house and too big to beat, so Dad and his brother George (‘our ...”

“... brave cowboys who inhabited them. The poem was published in English in a great translation by Walter Owen in 1935: And on the spot like two mad bulls Into each other we tore; The man was quick, but a bit too rash, And a backhand slash soon settled his hash, And I left him grunting and thrashing about, With his tripes all over the floor. ‘The figure of ...”