“... misunderstood him, applied a name from the romantic heritage – Einfühlung, by which he means ‘the intellectual love for the objects of experience’. To the extent that it entails a capacity to be engrossed, taken out of yourself in contemplation and at one with the objects of that contemplation, this last quality, or faculty, of mind might be ...”

“... And quite right too, of course, in one sense, but the implication may be that he is extreme about means as well as ends: totalitarian. This does not follow. To be precise, Michael Foot’s love of Parliament and of Parliamentary procedures is as deep as his radicalism. The vast majority of the Labour movement share this point of view. If there are now many ...”

“... Lwoff wrote: ‘L’art du chercheur c’est d’abord de se trouver un bon patron.’ To me, this means one who suggests good ideas, helps his students along without spoon-feeding or domineering, gives them public recognition for their work and later helps them to become established as independent scientists. How do you find one? The best way is to ask the ...”

“... clear out of Russia and leave the Russians to fight it out among themselves’. In Britain, David Lloyd George had similar reservations, but his government included a passionate supporter of the intervention, the newly appointed minister of munitions and soon to be secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill.Wilson’s scepticism meant that the ...”

“... If the publishers thought they were going to get the kind of sputtering firework that one of David Frost’s script associates might help him deliver into a tape-recorder, they haven’t. This is a book meant to be read and even kept. Indeed it might have more keepers than readers, since a probable majority of buyers will be the people mentioned in the ...”

“... the prehistory of the type of institution, or rather types of institution, which it embodies. This means looking back, not a hundred years but two hundred, and not to London or New York so much as to Paris. That city, long the chief supplier in Europe of luxury crafts, and the centre of modern fashion, was enabled by Napoleon’s conquests to appropriate much ...”

“... last, Fait et à faire, last February. This was soon followed by The Castoriadis Reader, edited by David Ames Curtis, Castoriadis’s major expositor in the English-speaking world: a festschrift edited by Curtis appeared last May as an issue of the journal, Thesis Eleven, which has been a major platform for Castoriadis’s ideas. In later life, Castoriadis ...”

“... is obsessively riding the New York subway when we first hear it. ‘There’s more to it,’ David Ferrie says in the same novel. ‘There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.’ Surface and secret: even when people dispute the details, the names and the numbers, they ...”

“... the lexicographer and informed by the general linguist, whose global concerns are represented by David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. ‘My purpose in writing this book,’ says Professor Crystal in his preface, ‘is to celebrate the existence of human language, and to provide a tribute to those who engage in its study.’ This purpose ...”

“... of response the book provokes, if it happens to do its thing for you. Nearly thirty years ago, David Lodge wrote a brilliant essay, called ‘The Modern, the Contemporary, and the Importance of Being Amis’, republished in his collection Language of Fiction (1966). All right, this essay said, so no one with any sense ever pretended that Lucky Jim was a ...”

“... original sin, secularised as the problem of anti-social behaviour, has been remarkably resilient. David Trotter believes that what we have learned to call Modernism is more akin to the cumulative trauma of secularisation, and that if we can’t get a wholly convincing sense of the beginnings of Modernism, we can get the next best thing: a sense of what the ...”

“... first-century BC Roman politics: ‘Once upon a time Rome was governed by a triumvirate . . . that means three consuls etc etc,’ as Astérix explains to an understandably bemused Obélix. Uderzo’s form has not always been so poor. Some of his earlier efforts proved to be elegant sequels to the joint series, neatly in tune with the changing politics, and ...”

“... add circulation systems and the like, then cover the whole with a dramatic glass top. By these means, Foster argues, ‘new architecture can be the catalyst for the revitalisation of old buildings’: ‘The Reichstag has become a “living museum” of German history,’ he claims, and ‘the Great Court is a new kind of civic space – a cultural plaza ...”

“... an oath of allegiance to the president and to refrain from political activity; its most important means of political representation, the Centre Party, one of the mainstays of democracy under the Weimar Republic, dissolved itself on 5 July under the threat of Nazi violence and pressure from the Vatican. In return, the rights of the Church were ...”

“... of radical Liberalism rather than its negation, and could only be secured by parliamentary means. But his aloofness also derived from his background. Unlike most of the party’s senior figures, he had no direct connection to the trade union movement; indeed, he was sceptical of the value of organised labour, and uneasy when he was expected to defend ...”