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“... little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight ...”

“... crescent when Rupert spots in a pile of abandoned stuff outside one of the houses, a rise and fall French light fitting, white pottery shade, a little battered, but with the counterweight intact. It’s a nice find, though, like its ex-owners, we don’t need the fitting, but if we did … It’s cheering for R., who’s in turmoil over developments at the ...”

“... into a 12-volume edition that appeared at the turn of the 20th century. It was read by the young Karl Jaspers during the First World War, and made him into Kierkegaard’s first philosophical disciple. Jaspers coined the notion of Existenzphilosophie, meaning a systematic philosophy of ‘choice’ and ‘authenticity’, of which Kierkegaard was supposed to ...”

“... she said, should wear a bra that cost less than $50 at Saks. Maeve Brennan photographed by Karl Bissinger in 1948 There are plenty of photographs of Brennan, but the one I remember is Karl Bissinger’s from 1948. Her black collar is high, and her eyes look behind him to a corner of the room; she’s not avoiding ...”

“... help had joyfully learnt its language: relatives rolled about laughing when Elias recited a French story he had learnt at school with a strong British accent. The father, a gentle, civilised man, hoped that his eldest son would go to university in England and perhaps become a doctor or teacher. Had he lived, his son’s destiny would have been very ...”

“... and parotid glands. Building on another century’s worth of thinking and research, the French naturalist René Réaumur trains a kite to swallow and regurgitate small porous tubes of food, to discover the role of gastric juices; and Spallanzani – who also did important work on parthenogenesis in tadpoles and on the role of sperm – swallowed and ...”

“... socialism; fired by Henry George, he was instructed mainly by Marx, whom he actually read (in French). Soon he was an indispensable Fabian. He worked like the devil – it is quite a relief to find him talking about his ‘inveterate laziness’, and to learn that on some days he ‘did practically nothing’. But on such days he must have been working at ...”

“... to act’ differentiates Brecht’s attitude from that of some others on the Left – such as Karl Korsch, from whose teaching on Marxist dialectics he learned a great deal – whose criticisms of the Soviet Union or of KPD policy led them to justify an inactivity and passivity which he found unacceptable. But, though he remained sceptical and independent ...”

“... the most important figure in the history of political thought. The renovation of Italy after the French revolutionary interlude brought, in Mazzinian nationalism, the archetype ol the new ‘age of nationalities’. After World War One, the crisis of the new and precarious national state engendered Fascism, an invention which, less than two decades ...”

“... oriented towards Europe, especially to France and Spain. Most Cuban writers could read and write French fluently, but very few had any English. The only thing American that was truly influential – and this only at a popular level – were Hollywood movies, as pervasive in Cuba then as they are in England now. Those remarkable achievements I mentioned ...”

“... she is told, ‘but you are in constant danger of falling on your face.’ She took English, art, French and botany and worried constantly about her workload, complaining that she has ‘to keep on like the White Queen to stay in the same place’. When she got a B- in her first English paper, it made her feel ‘slightly sick’. She dated with the fervour ...”

“... than Marx himself. Perhaps Marx invokes pre-modern values when he is copying French sources and denounces them when thinking on his own. In any case, the incoherence cannot be easily wished or explained away. Moreover, the ‘ice water of calculation’ did not rinse from modern life every last vestige of religious faith, family ...”

“... and taste for vengeance. (He had earlier acquiesced in the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the leaders of the short-lived Bolshevik uprising in Berlin, deaths which elicited from Weber the memorably heartless response: ‘They called up the street, and the street has dispatched them.’) In Munich, Red Terror was followed by White ...”

“... substantial basis for his convictions, rooted in earlier travails and a passionate conviction that Karl Popper had been right, in his view of science and philosophy as well as in the theories of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). A little later, I and many others were convoked to a seminar at which Ernest Gellner, Soros and Popper himself spoke – it ...”

“... 18th century. He had spent his long exile reading whatever he could find, including books on the French Revolution and Rousseau, on whom he eventually wrote a PhD thesis. Among his discoveries in a bookshop frequented by senior Party leaders had been an account of Gandhi in a book by Chester Bowles, a reluctant Cold Warrior and American ambassador to India ...”