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“... state-sanctioned murder was treated as an unpleasant necessity rather than a public festival. As Ira Katznelson records, in November 1933, more than a year after FDR’s election, Lloyd Warner was burned alive before a cheering crowd of ten thousand in Princess Anne, Maryland, after an attempt to hang him had failed. Nothing so ghastly was permitted on the ...”

“... is precarious. England casts an envious eye on Irish ports. Civil servants – scowling old IRA men, who once counted rifles and now count paperclips – draw up plans for when the Germans walk in and become the de facto power. Who is dropping the bombs? Is it the Germans, or is it the English, aiming to discredit the Germans? Half-hidden in the murk ...”

“... the streets and Suharto’s fantastic wealth. It was as if the Western media had reported that the Berlin Wall had been felled by a mindless crowd revolted by the Baltic villas of the East German élite and forgotten to recall the crimes of Stalinism. But then Suharto was ‘our’ criminal. When Gilchrist died in 1993, he was presented as a typically British ...”

“... another opportunity to revisit the tedious question of whether or not he was a member of the IRA. But that’s far from being the most interesting thing about him. Adams has spent the past couple of decades giving radically different messages to different constituencies, telling people what he thinks they want to hear, and making it hard to know what he ...”

“... blood. Percy’s brother Sidney had married Nelly’s sister Gretl and they took Nancy off to Berlin, where Sidney had found a job with a motion picture company; Eric was left in Vienna, boarding with a woman in exchange for giving English lessons to her son, and visiting his mother in one or another sanatorium. He was a cerebral, bookish child, living ...”

“... Enright spent most of his working life abroad as an English lecturer in Egypt, Japan, Germany (Berlin), Thailand, Singapore. Most of the poems written during these years record his responses to alien ideals and cultures, but all are underpinned by the need to believe in a common humanity. A poem called ‘Reflections on humanity’ ends with the ...”

“... to demonstrate moral principle in action at a national level. Dressed in its memorial trappings, Berlin today is the Nazi capital in sackcloth.Neiman seeks analogies between Germany’s experience and possible ways of recuperating the more or less unredeemed American past. What Nietzsche called ‘monumental’ history extracts from the past a particular ...”

“... were not just any old fleeting celebrities: they included Charles Laughton, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Ira Gershwin, e.e. cummings and Lord Mountbatten. He became conspicuously friendly with the Duke of Edinburgh. Science was not then, and has never been, a celebrity preoccupation, but war tends to move science rapidly up the agenda. Radar, the jet engine, nuclear ...”

“... outlawed these crappy referendums. First the British, now the Turks!’ (man at my local bakery in Berlin). Brexit has contributed to a gradual but tidal change in the way Germans see Europe. On the one hand, it is another element in the chaos they see unfolding around them: the failure of the Arab Spring, the implosion of Syria, the botched intervention in ...”

“... through my copy of The Habit of Excellence – Why Wehrmacht Leadership Works (Berlin, 1945). Copy has suffered some fire and water damage.’ On the home front, this is an institution in which three commanding brigadiers have recently been suspended or moved sideways: one for bullying, one for an ‘adverse climate assessment’, one for ...”

“... weapon. Even a halfway measure – a diplomatic intervention, a visit by Huber and Burckhardt to Berlin, a personal letter to Hitler – might have achieved something.’ What that ‘difference’ would have amounted to we can only guess. The Red Cross itself would have been strengthened. As Dunant’s Dream amply demonstrates, the guiding idea of ...”

“... purported inevitability characteristic of the genre, and condemned by liberals such as Popper and Berlin. Die Legitimität der Neuzeit was published in 1966, and has been much discussed in Germany, though not much elsewhere. Badly-educated English-speaking philosophers like myself (the kind who read long books in German only if they absolutely have to, non ...”

“... was released in 1947. Bethnal Green masquerades as an expressionist Belfast. James Mason is an IRA gunman on the run. Twenty years later, his Hollywood career in decline, Mason returned once more to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels, to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody Knows. Umbrella ...”

“... sociologists and theologians, students of the symbolic rather than the technical. Lorraine Daston Berlin It’s Islamic fundamentalism, not The Satanic Verses, that represents a blasphemous version of the Koran. Most ideology, however, works by a distinction between what one does and what one says one does, such that the one does not impinge too ...”