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“... that ‘the interesting tenant of Amerongen’ who liked German sparkling wine was the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm. To get maximum value out of these few pages, you should also be capable of recognising allusions to Walter Scott’s Kenilworth and to the ‘War Song of Dinas Vawr’, a poem from Thomas Love Peacock’s The ...”

“... form of Mike Davis. In his epigraph Davis situates himself and his ambitions with a quotation from Walter Benjamin: ‘The superficial inducement, the exotic, the picturesque has an effect only on the foreigner. To portray a city, a native must have other, deeper motives – motives of one who travels into the past instead of into the distance. A native’s ...”

“... who ‘loathed democracy’. It was Januschau, himself a Reichstag deputy, who said that the kaiser should be able to disband the Reichstag with a lieutenant and ten soldiers, and who called for preventive war against France. He thought that the British were far too soft with the Irish, whose impertinent claims should be smashed with the ruthlessness ...”

“... was given a post as technical attaché to the German Embassy with a brief to report back to the Kaiser on art, architecture, technology and railways. He was not, despite what was later said, a spy, merely an unusually observant visitor who already knew what to look out for. He and Anna took a house, The Priory, well away from the diplomatic quarter in Arts ...”

“... pioneering Thesaurus of the Northern languages, but again did not pick up popularity till after Walter Scott. ‘Valkyries’ were introduced to English by Gray in 1768, closely followed by Percy’s translation of the Swiss professor Paul-Henri Mallet’s Monuments de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes et particulièrement des anciens ...”

“... black granite tombstone in the Ohlsdorf Cemetery in Hamburg, an Elysium of the burgher dead: ‘Walter Laqueur MD’ is inscribed in Jugendstil characters, the same lettering in which ‘Dr Laqueur’ appears on the plaque that was once outside his radiology office and is now on my gate in Berkeley. There were also two pictures of him on my grandmother’s ...”

“... life of the last three years’, but also elicited the first of several fine appreciations from Walter de la Mare, who was not only aware of Eastaway’s real identity, but knew of his death just three weeks earlier. De la Mare described the poems as ‘final and isolated’, while also pinpointing ‘a kind of endlessness in the experience they tell ...”

“... chief justices, lords lieutenant, lords mayor, George Moore, Sir William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, Walter Osborne, Jack Yeats, my famous namesake his brother Bill, Padraic Colum, John Millington Synge, young painters like Paddy Tuohy who really did paint old J.S. Joyce and died of his own hand, poor Sean O’Sullivan who died of liquor and love and ...”

“... its most vivid street-level expression in avid consumerism. As Peter Gay put it, paraphrasing Walter Gropius: ‘The cure for the ills of modernity is more, and the right kind, of modernity.’ This could be Mod speaking. Gay’s reflection is from his 1968 book Weimar Culture, and its subtitle is also applicable here: The Outsider as Insider. The tension ...”

“... lineage was even more exotic than Philby’s: while his father was a staunch subject of the Kaiser, his paternal great-uncle, Friedrich Adolf Sorge, knew Marx and Engels, and had served as Secretary-General of the First International when it moved to New York in the 1870s. Both Sorge and Philby enjoyed privileged educations which turned them, at least ...”

“... of rooms, some preserved but so many lost, the book is an imaginative reconstruction, like Walter Mehring’s Die Verlorene Bibliothek, in which Mehring, who had to leave his library behind for the Nazi firebrands when he fled, reaches back, after the war, to fondle his books through memory. So really dilettantism, if it is an accusation, is just about ...”

“... does not have to rename every Bismarck Allee or tear down the statues of the Iron Chancellor or Kaiser Wilhelm in order to discredit militant nationalism or Prussian militarism. Utter defeat in 1945 and the geopolitical consequences of the war rendered the Second Reich history and transformed its memorials into heritage. (It’s true that Germany has ...”

“... the great intellectual presence in the extended Stern family, was forced out as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry at Berlin-Dahlem. (He resigned before he was fired.) ‘In my whole life,’ he confided to Einstein, ‘I have never felt so Jewish as now.’ Young Fritz, too, came to feel for the first time ...”