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“... Europe in the 1830s and 1840s – is the most fascinating part of his book. The trauma left by the French Revolution – the Terror and the Napoleonic conquests – was wearing off. In July 1830 Paris rose, expelling the Bourbon dynasty. Revolution became terrifyingly contagious: Belgium rebelled and won its independence; violent protest broke out in parts of ...”

“... action on my temperament and fashioned my still plastic character.’ It was thus that, whereas French was his language as an intellectual, English (for all of Ford’s would-be-Gallic complaints of its unsuitability for literature) was his chosen language as an artist. It need not surprise us, therefore, that the qualities which he embraced ...”

“... was a good thing, a bad thing, or neither or both. An early entrant in this Historikerstreit was Karl Marx. In the summer of 1853, he wrote two articles on British rule in India in the New York Daily Tribune. He wrote that ‘the profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it ...”

“... conventional. A frequent accusation levelled against Kinsey by, among others, the psychiatrist Karl Menninger, was that he studied sexual behaviour and not love. The film chooses this as its moral and it ends with Kinsey having a Damascus moment, parking his car to run around a forest with his wife, hugging trees and chasing deer to the sound of ...”

“... to withdraw his demand, a truck bomb exploded at the CPA’s entrance, killing 23 and wounding 95. Karl Rove, not Condoleezza Rice – and not Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld – deals this corner of the game, one of whose objectives is to rebrand the president as a man of peace. Thus, the White House has retreated from pre-emptive and preventive war with both ...”

“... Working​ on Capital in the British Museum, plagued by creditors and carbuncles, Karl Marx complained not only that nobody had ever written so much about money and had so little of it, but that ‘this economic crap’ was keeping him from writing his big book on Balzac. His work is studded with allusions to Homer, Sophocles, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe and scores of other authors, though he was less enthralled by ‘Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet’ Edmund Spenser, an advocate of state terror in Ireland ...”

“... view of psychoanalysis is a politer and more circuitous version of the celebrated jibe in which Karl Kraus defined it as ‘that spiritual disease of which it considers itself to be the cure’. And Kraus himself, the arch-accuser of a misbegotten 20th century, provides Heller with the occasion for another tribute to the redeeming and reparative power of ...”

“... War and Peace, young Nikolai Rostov first rides, into action with his fellow hussars against the French at Austerlitz, he feels that the longed-for time has come ‘to experience the intoxication of a charge’, about which he has heard so much. At first he is indeed elated, but then the unseen enemy suddenly becomes visible, Rostov’s horse is shot under ...”

“... not and looked it up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I learnt that its founder, the 19th-century French philosopher August Comte, called his Cours de Philosophie ‘Positive’, because it was concerned only with positive facts. The sciences had to study the facts and regularities of nature and formulate them as descriptive laws, and not, as Planck had ...”

“... own accounts of events, and gives several if no single one can be authenticated. He clearly knows French well, but for excerpted French conversation and commentary he does his own translations, and these reveal inelegances in his English even more than does the body of the text. ‘You’ll end up in the dumps,’ someone ...”

“... people would have spoken both Latin and proto-Welsh – rather like Tolstoyan aristos speaking French and Russian. As the fourth century wore on, Roman-occupied Britain was hit by a string of attacks from the other side of Hadrian’s Wall, with Picts and Scots increasingly working in conjunction with Saxon and Frankish sea-raiders. The attacks came (and ...”

“... mirrors that cultural shift by privileging performances by Brüggen, Gardiner and Pinnock over Karl Böhm, George Szell and Eugen Jochum, pillars of the Austro-German tradition whose interpretations are now discreetly tucked away as ‘supplementary’ performances, historical oddities. Böhm never gets the notes wrong, but his orchestral plod suffocates ...”

“... of rescue, and pansexual before that term was in use. (He sometimes slept with his friend, the French actor Christian Marquand.) Mann uses that New School punch-up to explore Brando’s unceasing sexual adventurism, and his habit of seeking parental figures and then abandoning them. There was a natural promiscuity to him, like an actor who wondered if he ...”

“... enhanced in Russia by an incomprehension that was sometimes literal: young nobles often learned French first and spoke Russian only with difficulty.By the 19th century, however, educated elites all over Europe were drawn, whether by poetry, paintings or music, towards a romantic notion of the rural poor. The beginnings of capitalist industrialisation and ...”

“... in Alsace was found with ease by journalists, but who remained ‘introuvable’ by the French Police. Is it conceivable that this was because the witness might have disproved the involvement of Barbie in the most heinous crime of which he was accused, the only one that clearly came under the heading of a ‘crime against humanity’, which, since ...”