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“... resort to the bland evasions of personal taste. The problem of the Pisan Cantos is that stated in Walter Benjamin’s dictum: ‘There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ Pound’s paradise, like many utopias, is a hell for the excluded; Milton long ago raised the possibility that the songs of the ...”

“... unemployment and political instability, a generation was seeking a complete break with the past; Walter Gropius had recently founded the Bauhaus school in Weimar, a laboratory that hoped to provide an architectural blueprint for a new future. Mies – who walked out on his wife and three daughters, claiming he needed ‘freedom’ – spent time in the ...”

“... and that stretches to the writings of Elizabeth Bowen and to Peter Grimes, the opera with which Benjamin Britten returned from the States to England in 1942 – we encounter sensibilities thoroughly au fait with European modernism who nonetheless adopted the passion for the particular that is the hallmark of Romanticism. That is how Harris responds to the ...”

“... of ‘how it really was’, in von Ranke’s famous phrase, or of ‘the way it is’, as Walter Cronkite said on US television for twenty years or so, and they have to deal with their own scepticism and ours. We could start by wondering what ‘it’ was, before we even get to asking what ‘really’ means. And then there is Nietzsche’s remark ...”

“... want to lose or reduce the extravagance but can’t quite fall for it either. An example would be Walter Benjamin’s wonderful remark about missed experiences in Proust: None of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us – this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the ...”

“... out of it. Observing Kemalist cultural policies in 1936-37, Erich Auerbach wrote from Istanbul to Walter Benjamin: ‘the process is going fantastically and spookily fast: already there is hardly anyone who knows Arabic or Persian, and even Turkish texts of the past century will quickly become incomprehensible.’ Combining ‘a renunciation of all ...”

“... a political alternative. The influence of the Frankfurt group, however – Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin, Loewenthal, among others – did not break out of social and into literary thought until recently. Norris, in any case, sees that deconstruction made an impact on literary studies precisely because, unlike structuralism, it did not seek to be a ...”

“... John Robins was cursed as ‘that last great Antichrist’. One of the last to be cursed was Walter Scott. (They did blessings too.) Leadership and discipline was exerted through letters, and also through occasional face-to-face encounters with opponents. The letters were then incorporated and given a wider currency in printed pamphlets and books, which ...”

“... who had several pieces in the show, had written Surrealist prose-poems and translated Breton and Benjamin Péret. In the previous couple of years, he had begun producing collages, poetic ‘objects’ and photographs, and there’s a direct link between these techniques in art and his preference for montage documentaries, which operate on the principle that ...”

“... of fraud and a stock-market rout, he appeared in Haifa on 31 January, smiling for pictures with Benjamin Netanyahu and hailing the Abraham Accords brokered by Jared Kushner as a ‘gamechanger’, as he took charge of Israel’s largest port. Adani’s ‘liberation’ of Haifa, as Netanyahu put it, brings closer the prospect of a rail link between Israel ...”

“... where he earned his PhD. At Morehouse, King was inspired by the lectures of the college president, Benjamin Mays, who urged students to challenge segregation and was strongly influenced by the Social Gospel movement popularised by the theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, who in the late 19th century had argued that the fight for ...”

“... imperial expansion increasingly tethered to narratives of national interest and grandeur. In 1852 Benjamin Disraeli had described the colonies as ‘a millstone round our necks’; they were burdens on the motherland and impediments to free trade. But by the end of the century Cecil Rhodes’s view that imperial expansion was a ‘bread and butter ...”

“... MacNeice gave a reading at the Keynote Club in Manhattan. Kallman and another Brooklyn student, Walter James Miller, were in the audience, with Kallman sitting in the front row giving the two international pederasts the glad eye. Afterwards he and Miller went backstage. Miller was tall, blond, Anglo-Saxon and (a friend who was not a ...”

“... admired colleague/bugbear. To Douglas in 1945 he describes him as ‘arse over tippett’; to Walter Legge in 1975 he writes that the success of Tippett’s opera The Midsummer Marriage ‘to me is one of the mysteries of life’. He looks forward to having him stay in one of the houses that he and his wife rent out on Ischia, ‘as I’m very fond of ...”

“... insufficiently bullish towards America’s godless Communist enemies. He even chose a humanist, Walter Mondale, as his vice-president. In the early 1970s, Christian leaders had started building the alternative networks of communication and scholarship that still define the evangelical movement: this was the moment when Christian television channels began to ...”