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“... is appropriate to the extravagance of the myth. Parallels with some of Heinrich Mann’s black comedies, with the use of fable and grotesquerie in The Tin Drum, perhaps with Marquez, come to mind. Syberberg uses Brechtian techniques of alienation (placards, back-projection, narrative monologue) to achieve the same distancing effect. But he does not ...”

“... and omissions. The scope of the inclusions is certainly impressive, with attention given to black and woman writers and to a broader range of British writing than might have been expected from an American critic: there can be few readers who will not find ways into new poetic territory from this enthusiastically written book. Perkins is at times forced ...”

“... Tzara, Hilberseimer, van Doesburg … Lissitzky, Gabo, Pevszner [sic], Kiesler, Man Ray, Soupault, Benjamin, Hausmann etc’ – an impressive roll-call.In 1927, aged 41 and at the vanguard of modern architecture, Mies was invited to plan a showcase development in Stuttgart, the Weissenhofsiedlung, for which he invited 15 collaborators, including Gropius, Le ...”

“... war into an anti-aircraft unit, from which he deserted. He supported his family after the war by black-market dealing while he worked for his Abitur, before studying literature and philosophy at German universities and the Sorbonne. After completing a dissertation on the Romantic writer Clemens Brentano in 1955, he worked as a radio editor in Stuttgart. The ...”

“... it meant ‘to see yet another generation going cheerfully off to face death’. Inspecting the Black Watch she had an unsettling moment of déjà vu, seeing her nephew in uniform. ‘I thought for an awful moment that it was my brother Fergus who was killed in France when serving with the same regiment. It was only for one second – a flash, a family ...”

“... eggs from the surrounding jelly, he noted that their outward covering mostly consisted of ‘small black dots’ – knobbly, ‘like shagreen leather’ – below which there lay ‘watery fluid, and an incredible number of globules, each of which globules again consisted of a large number of smaller globules, each of which had in its centre a larger ...”

“... pearlescent creamware (called ‘Queensware’ after Queen Charlotte bought a table service) to black ‘basalt’, which was matte and sooty as a lump of coal and often painted with red figures in imitation of ancient vases. Wedgwood was always trying to make his vases seem ‘un-pot-like’, to lift them out of the earthy associations of clay and make ...”

“... Relations among the European states would henceforth be driven by a new and unfamiliar dynamic. Benjamin Disraeli makes no appearance in Chrastil’s book, but he saw the problem more clearly than most: ‘This war represents the German Revolution, a greater political event than the French,’ he declared in the House of Commons on 9 February 1871. There ...”

“... as into another sea.’ It’s distinctive, too, in providing the illusion of a living history: black-hatted men still stride across the campo of the ghetto, buy pastries at Gam Gam, the kosher restaurant. It’s easy to feel you’ve stepped back a few centuries. But the men are Chabad-Lubavitchers, mostly from the US and Israel, who invite secular and ...”

“... novels that are praised on social media as ‘discursive’ and ‘weird’ (e.g. the work of Benjamin Labatut or Jenny Erpenbeck). Unfortunately, Creation Lake is a sloppy book whose careless construction and totalising cynicism come to feel downright hostile. As I read, I kept wondering, why did you even write this?Sadie Smith (the name did make me ...”

“... ten thousand women, hundreds with young children. Several were well known: Hannah Arendt; Dora Benjamin, Walter’s sister; Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of Lion; the actress Dita Parlö, whose character falls in love with Jean Gabin’s in La Grande Illusion; Lisa Fittko, a passeuse who risked her life guiding scores of refugees out of France across the ...”

“... exorcise the fetid miasma of the Millennium Dome on the Greenwich peninsula. The Dome wasn’t a black hole – even though it was costing us £240,000 a month to keep it empty – it was more of a hole in the head, a throbbing non-presence. It had never really been there, and its special status, Banquo’s ghost at the New Labour feast, was a confidence ...”

“... literature on contemporary attitudes towards animals generally, and towards pets in particular. Black Beauty is mentioned in passing, but nowhere do we hear about the Romanticism that may have helped shape the strong and affectionate feelings that Germans even now hold for animals and nature; nor do we meet Eliot’s cats or Kipling’s rich ...”

“... that appeared in response to the Covid pandemic and the autonomous zones asserted during the Black Lives Matter uprisings. Nevertheless, for all the fearmongering about antifa (as if to be anti-fascist was a bad thing), anarchism may be another arena where the right has largely muscled out the left. The battle cry of Steve Bannon and gang in ...”

“... 1949. A brass band played as guests chose from a Mitteleuropean selection of drinks: champagne, black coffee or Alma’s favourite, Bénédictine (by the end of her life, she was drinking a bottle a day). In the dining room, an abundant buffet was laid out. Luminaries from the ‘German California’ scene came to pay homage to the widow of the composer ...”