“... the precise mauve shade of a pair of trousers she ‘saw but did not buy’ in a market in Berlin. One chapter is devoted to her enviable collection of swimming costumes – training Speedos, china-patterned vintage smocks, elegant black one-pieces – which are photographed like trophies.Midway through the book a note of unease creeps in. In her first ...”

“... might become an occasion for political agitation. After a week of protests and demonstrations in Berlin orchestrated by Goebbels, All Quiet on the Western Front was withdrawn. ‘Victory is ours!’ Goebbels’s newspaper Der Angriff exulted. This episode, taking place scarcely more than two years before the Nazis seized power, was a straw in the wind: it ...”

“... that Melville compares whale migration to the seasonal patterns of the fashionable, convenes in Berlin or Dubrovnik one summer only to divide and reassemble in Capri or San Francisco the next. (The peripatetic paradigm is Sir Stephen Spender, but Macdonald made an effort to run him close.) Third, he was an adopter of causes and had a pronounced tendency to ...”

“... theory of ‘linguistic relativity’, nowadays associated by linguists primarily with the work of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, is shown to go back, not merely to Humboldt’s work on the Kawi language, but beyond Humboldt to Condillac and to Locke. It is this principle which informs Locke’s scepticism about the possibility of translating from one ...”

“... and just junior to Louis MacNeice and John Betjeman. Among his friends at Oxford were Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Bowra and Stephen Spender, with whom he coedited the magazine Oxford Poetry in 1930. In his excellent introduction to this definitive Complete Poetry, Peter Robinson characterises Spencer as an unconfident poet who, when his luck was in, wrote ...”

“... wanted grand writing – one thinks of Parry’s ‘I was glad’, written for the coronation of Edward VII in 1902 – there were composers good enough to provide it. There was a coming together from 1870 onwards of the music that was being written for Anglican services, the attitude of the authorities to it and the social standing of the composers ...”

“... Brecht had controversially acknowledged. The workers’ protests in Poznan in June echoed the East Berlin demonstrations three years before, to which Brecht had responded sufficiently ambiguously to win the Stalin Peace Prize. He died on 14 August, not knowing that Poznan would prove a dress rehearsal for the Hungarian Uprising in October, which itself took ...”

“... what to do with the caped crusader. Eden, the Foreign Secretary, paid him a private visit, but Edward VIII refused to invite him to Buckingham Palace, and when the former Emperor lunched at the House of Commons, Baldwin hid behind a table to avoid meeting him. As the Conquering Lion of Judah began several miserable years of exile in Worthing, Steer, along ...”

“... go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music halls, held parties with naked dancing girls and got into fights on Tottenham Court Road. It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg ...”

“... works of literary scholarship, was written between 1942 and 1945 in Istanbul, where Auerbach, a Berlin Jew, had taken refuge from the Nazis. The book was published in 1946, and this new edition, with an introduction by Edward Said, marks the 50th anniversary of its first appearance in the United States. Auerbach ranges ...”

“... Saxe-Meiningen: but no more than Anne and George of Denmark could they keep their children alive. Edward Kent, as it turned out, won the race by getting a girl, Victoria, in 1818. The proud mother, Victoria, Duchess of Kent, was the widow of the late Prince of Leiningen – and the sister, it so happened, of Leopold of Coburg. What later became famous, or ...”

“... force, this imaginative map ingrained with irony. Starting from a description of a Greek statue in Berlin, it moves towards the               middle of the earth, yearned- for stepmotherland of Hölderlin and Goethe that is Hellas, and remains, even through a sequence of undistinguished poems on George Eliot and Dorothy Wordsworth, haunted by ...”

“... an important part of that great afterwash of Romanticism in the Western mind that Isaiah Berlin and others taught us about: the notion is that (in Berlin’s words) ‘variety is, in general, preferable to uniformity,’ and that ‘what is real is individual, that is, is what it is in virtue of its uniqueness, its ...”

“... concealed beneath the name of a “great man”?’ (She refers to the Shakespearean contender, Edward de Vere, as ‘the Count of Oxford’ – someone who truly never was.) Peter Gay​ and others saw Freud’s early bafflement as instilling heroic habits of curiosity. Whitebook places more stress on the trauma rather than the Oedipal conundrum, and on ...”

“... Central Powers and above all to Germany, whose support for Austria had been decisive. It was in Berlin, Albertini insisted, without actually making the case, that ‘all the acts and all the roles in the tragedy were settled in advance.’ Anderson notes the subtle modulations in the book’s tone: the missteps of the Entente powers are narrated ‘more in ...”