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“... universe. Donald McCrory’s new biography, pious in tone and lumpishly written, could hardly be more different. Humboldt was part of a great flowering of German intellectual life in the decades either side of 1800, the period when Germaine de Staël called Germany the land of poets and thinkers. Quite a few of the writers came in pairs, whether fathers ...”

“... century. The confessional conflicts, rebellions, plagues and famines of the 16th century were mild by comparison. ‘’Tis tru we have had many such black days in England in former ages,’ James Howell wrote in 1647, ‘but those parallel’d to the present are to the shadow of a mountain compar’d to the eclipse of the moon.’ In his Essay on the Customs ...”

“... virgin, more often partially domesticated. We leave our prints on it, our tracks, and used by generations these become a track, a trail, a trod, a path, a highway. Ever since my memory began I have followed such tracks with foot and eye: the stony, grassy drove roads along which herds and flocks travelled from Aberdeenshire to southern trysts and ...”

“... point to its cars, those Eisenhower-era Buicks and Oldsmobiles and Plymouths, held together by Cuban ingenuity and powered by Russian engines and other improvised innards. But on the Malecón, the grand boulevard along the Caribbean at the city’s northern edge, stands a row of other remnants from that era: battered ...”

“... the governing assumptions about intellectuals, but it doesn’t square with the facts. France may be a special case, especially France between the 1930s and the 1950s, but the British situation should be regarded as ‘one distinctive variant of a larger international pattern’. Germany, Russia, Italy and the United ...”

“... That’s the theory, though minute descriptions of naval repairs and battle strategy wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of husbandly billets-doux. But then again he is writing into a void, or near void: when a telegram comes from Sophie, it contains the single-word message ‘Well’. He isn’t tempted by the fleshpots of ...”

“... study, summarised in the Independent, which attempted to rank nations as more or less neurotic by measuring rates of suicide, crime, divorce and the consumption of alcohol and caffeine. The UK came out as the world’s eighth most stable, extroverted nation (just ahead of Germany), while Hungary and France ranked as the most neurotic and introverted. The ...”

“... MacDiarmid, was still crowing about this. As an established man of letters, he could afford to be wry about the story, but the fact that he tells it at all makes clear his own big-headedness – the great pleasure he took in the enormousness and occasional enormity of his ego – as well as his lifelong obsession with size and comparison. Norman ...”

“... compelled to list ‘Lolita complex’ in the index), and raised, with his wife, the child he had by the wife of one of his assistants. Then there were the children who never grew up: practical jokers like the brilliant Russian Lev Landau or the acid-tongued Wolfgang Pauli. They formed a tight-knit community. When not meeting at Bohr’s Institute for ...”

“... has chosen this moment to burgle the safe in the president’s office, and is caught redhanded by a secretary. As they struggle, she presses the button used to summon the janitor from his basement hutch. Gloomy already, Charlie doesn’t exactly jump to it. What follows is a brilliant pastiche of the race-to-the-rescue sequences D.W. Griffith pioneered in ...”

“... leader of the Labour Party, who wins power at a general election but has it prised away from him by a conspiracy of securocrats, tycoons and Labour turncoats. Its characters were recognisable as an amalgam of the passing generation of Labour heavyweights, from Benn himself to Barbara Castle and bruisers like Denis Healey and Eric Heffer. Its atmosphere ...”

“... member, I have now read, in addition to the biography, the full-length critical studies by David Mikics and James Naremore, watched Jan Harlan’s excellent documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, and explored every entry in The Stanley Kubrick Archives edited by Alison Castle: a 13-pound ...”

“... hard to gauge. But in the Trump presidency so far, the underlying condition is chaos – renewable by whim, chance or microscopic provocation.Trump hired Bolton and Pompeo partly because they share his passionate hostility towards Iran. It didn’t occur to him that they would be lukewarm supporters of his agreement with ...”

“... the 1954 Senate hearings on subversive influence in the army. But those hearings turned out to be McCarthy’s last crusade; in a formal and spectacular sense, his career ended when Joseph Welch, a Boston lawyer and counsel for the army, replied to the ascription of Communist connections to a young lawyer on his staff: ‘Until this moment, Senator, I ...”

“... evil, what they themselves embody still includes much evil. All of the good that a nation can do by violence is contingent; the evil is real and palpable. ‘Nothing is intrinsically good,’ Niebuhr remarks, ‘except goodwill.’ Hence the need for the discipline of prayer; a wish for the purity of heart to sustain the attention necessary for good ...”