“... all its hierarchical features subordinated to the rule of the public’s footsteps’. The street may be too wide for pedestrian comfort, but at least it is a street, and a ‘surprisingly convincing’ one. I’m confused by Hatherley’s perspective on streets. I would have thought that as a modernist and an admirer of council tower blocks in Britain, he ...”

“... unpublished journals, hints that his reservations about a complacent liberal imagination may have emerged from painful self-awareness – even self-disgust. The thought that he had ‘one of the great reputations in the academic world’ made him ‘retch’. Envious of Hemingway, and harried by his wife, Diana, Trilling confessed periodically to ...”

“... the very worst things you can say to people. And the meaning of the proverb, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.’ Tebogo has kicked the jotter out of reach, so I kneel myself on the red-brown cement and extract it from the tangle of legs, chair and human. I see Tebogo’s shins before I rise. Pale circular scars, the size ...”

“... relying on him to help steer Germany through the negotiations. When Wirth became chancellor in May 1921, he appointed Rathenau minister of reconstruction, and the next month, speaking in the Reichstag, Rathenau formally announced the government’s intention to ‘fulfil’ the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, including the payment of reparations in both ...”

“... died in 1937). After returning from the Far East, Suret started a course at the Sorbonne, but in May 1940, as the Germans advanced on Paris, he and his student communist friends got on their bikes and went off to the west of France. Back in Paris later that year, Suret was arrested by the Vichy police for posting flyers. Handed over to the Germans, he saw ...”

“... To be right when everybody else has been wrong can be a lonely, even disabling experience. This may be a way of understanding the enigmatic character of Joachim Fest, the German historian, journalist and editor who died six years ago. His Berlin family belonged to the Bildungsbürgertum – roughly, the well-educated middle class – and rejected Hitler and National Socialism from the very first moment ...”

“... body travelled back to Edinburgh accompanied by his wife.) The court granted its first divorce in May 1858. Henry’s case was heard a month later. In September the judges delivered their verdict: Isabella was not guilty and Henry, enraged, didn’t get his divorce. The argument that the diary was not to be trusted, which had been used all along to exonerate ...”

“... to persuade oneself that these might be a large clue to his work’s private meaning. (‘New life may take old patterns,’ he writes in The Hills of Adonis of the impersonal afterlives suggested by ancient religions, ‘but never again does it reproduce the mind, the look, the cadence of a voice, as it once had been. And we, who love the ...”

“... different head of state, such as Göring or Himmler, Germany might have sued for peace well before May 1945. But the Allies had agreed at Casablanca in January 1943 to demand nothing short of unconditional surrender from Germany. The armistice in the First World War had been a costly mistake, they concluded. It had allowed the far right, not least the ...”

“... in the German-run town of the same name (now transliterated as Qingdao). In Qingdao itself, you may come across the imposing Romanesque-revival edifice of St Michael’s Cathedral, which looks as if it belongs in a city somewhere in north Germany a century or so ago, as, in a sense, it does. All in all, it’s not much compared to the extensive ...”

“... to take the interest in the ‘little man’ that became the hallmark of his writing. ‘The war may have brought misery to many,’ Fallada wrote to his therapist Dr Artur Tecklenburg in 1915, ‘but it did only good to me, because during peacetime no one would have considered me for such responsibilities.’ For all his new-found faith in other ...”

“... not (apparently) debilitating. The novel, for one: it can make gentility its subject. The subject may strike one, the more one rereads, as a minor and exhaustible one, if put alongside the accounts of being-in-the-social-world available to the Irish, say, or the Russians or Americans. I used to laugh in California at the way American students of modern ...”

“... in the palace, so terrified was he in the confusion that followed the murder. Caligula’s reign may not have started too badly. There was perhaps one of those brief honeymoon periods which regularly accompanied a change of ruler in ancient Rome. In Caligula: A Biography, Winterling points to a range of conciliatory measures in the early ...”

“... pose of asceticism and indifference to luxury was deceptive. He never carried a wallet and may not even have used a bank account, but he enjoyed a fat private income, mostly from Mein Kampf royalties and later as a percentage from sales of postage stamps with the Führer’s head on them. Although he couldn’t drive – or swim or dance – he adored ...”

“... region’s other ruling NLMs to cling to power indefinitely. Seen this way the drama of Zimbabwe may indeed prefigure a more general crisis as these movements age and decay. We have seen enough of movements that believe they will remain to see the state wither away or to usher in a thousand-year Reich to know that bringing them to accept a less intransigent ...”