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“... young enjoyed Bavarian and Austrian heartiness; young intellectuals welcomed life in Berlin and Hamburg, UFA movies, Expressionist painting and the Bauhaus. And what had been the result? Hitler. When the British contemplated the ruined German cities they hardly felt a twinge – they remembered only too well the Nazi leaders and the Luftwaffe ...”

“... contributions to the Vienna Society, backed up by this memoir so ably edited and reconstructed by Edward Timms, make possible a reconsideration of some of the most contentious issues in psychoanalysis: the problem of the ‘problem of women’, and the disappearance of the idea of sexual liberation. And indeed the question of why sexuality should be so easily ...”

“... ruthless men. He meets his ‘other half’ of the Agency, Dix Butler, a cruel exploiter of local Berlin agents, and has a gruelling soirée with him on the Kurfürstendamm which culminates when‘Let me be the first,’ he said, and he bent over nimbly, put his fingertips to the floor and then his knees, and raised his powerful buttocks to me. ‘Come ...”

“... the elaborate plan by the CIA and MI6 in the early Fifties to tunnel into the Russian sector of Berlin, so that communications from there could be ‘monitored’. The plan was called Operation Gold. There was really nothing wrong with it, except that the secretary of the committee which planned it was the British MI6 officer and Russian spy, George ...”

“... has nothing to say about the place of Jews in English intellectual life. One finds no mention of Berlin, or Namier; no mention of Gollancz or Weidenfeld. The book scarcely refers to the Jewish contribution to English literature and art. One finds no mention of Feinstein, Jacobson, Abse, Silkin, Litvinoff, Josipovici or Bernice Rubens; no mention of ...”

“... And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt than had been believed. The Conservative pundit Richard Brookhiser gave us ...”

“... For after all, the inspiring motive for two of the other finest combatant poets of the Great War, Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney, was patriotism. One could, if one wished, even make Edward Thomas out to be a jingoist, for did he not write: But with the best and meanest Englishmen I am one in crying, God save England, lest ...”

“... of political life was essentially literary, but that’s putting it mildly. Rilke lived in Berlin, then in an artists’ colony near Bremen, where he met and married the sculptor Clara Westhoff. They had a daughter, Ruth, often abandoned to her grandparents, and pretty much entirely abandoned by her father. The marriage itself seems to have been only a ...”

“... by virtue of their religion, literature and laws, were as Jewish as he was. Douglas Hurd and Edward Young’s Disraeli: or, the Two Lives, and Robert O’Kell’s Disraeli: The Romance of Politics diverge when they come to Disraeli’s Byronism. Hurd and Young wave it aside: ‘Disraeli aspired to a career like that of Byron, Shelley and the other ...”

“... trial in Camiri as part of an effort to save his life. All this left a mark. But it was at the Berlin congress organised in January 1968 by the SDS, the left-wing German students, that I began to feel the need to join some organisation. Rudi Dutschke was there, the Wolf brothers with Ulrike Meinhof skulking in the background and three black GIs marching to ...”

“... pulled him out of Romania, made him head of OSS’s secret intelligence operations and sent him to Berlin just as the war in Europe was ending. Wisner was already a fervent anti-communist, but his feelings were intensified by Soviet misbehaviour in Germany.When he became president after Roosevelt’s death, Truman took Hoover’s side in the wrangling over ...”

“... can limit our freedom of action’? A reasonable question, one might think, not only about Isaiah Berlin’s influential defence of ‘negative’ against ‘positive’ liberty but about the whole tradition of liberalism. Yet Skinner’s own understanding of liberty is not immune to the same awkward question. The contest between republicanism and liberalism ...”

“... joke – the emigré dachshund, spurned by the English dogs in the park, who insists that back in Berlin he had been a Great Dane. There were those, even less fortunate, who did not make it at all: arriving penniless and with little knowledge of English, they ended up on the bottle, in the debtors’ prison, in the madhouse or floating down the river. Even ...”

“... who moonlighted as jazz musicians or aeronautical entrepreneurs. Among his friends were Rupert Edward Lee ‘Buddy’ Featherstonhaugh, who became the second British driver to win a Grand Prix race, Arthur Conan Doyle’s son Denis, and Prince Birabongse Bhanudej Bhanubandh of Siam, who raced as ‘B. Bira’ in a car painted ‘bright peacock blue, its ...”

“... Burckhardt, William Thomson (known as Osman effendi), John Gardner Wilkinson, Robert Hay and Edward Lane also ‘went native’ on their travels. Like Champollion, they aped the robes and turbans of the Ottoman ruling class, browned their skin, and made a show of living in ‘Oriental’ style. Hay, Burton and Gardner Wilkinson took their sex lives ...”