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“... pursued ideas of material progress, or ‘improvement’. In The Invention of Improvement (2015), Paul Slack interestingly showed how a word that originally referred to profitable agrarian innovation took on a more general meaning as a progressive slogan for beneficial change of any kind. ‘Improvement’ was the application of reason and ingenuity to the ...”

“... as a way of replicating or ‘amplifying’ the chaos and violence all around.Isou’s genius lay not so much in what he did to language, however, as in his PR stunts. In 1946, he and his friend Gabriel Pomerand, a would-be actor and, by most accounts, a psychopath, sabotaged the opening night of a play by Tzara at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. The ...”

“... eyes of most commentators, there were two prime suspects: the responsibility for the Brexit vote lay with either economic privation or cultural loss. In The Lure of Greatness, Anthony Barnett, the founder of Charter 88 and co-founder of Open Democracy, has identified a third: the constitution. Those who focus on the economic explanation, for Brexit as for ...”

“... to be the legitimate descendant of the Roman imperium. Charles may never, as he wearily told Pope Paul III in 1536, have had any ambition to be the master of the universe – dominus totius orbis – as which his advisors and panegyrists had so often portrayed him. But he certainly aimed at keeping his scattered domains as one polity, with one ruler, one ...”

“... type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing ...”

“... there was a sense of living in an open prison. In my case, this oppressive sense of unfreedom lay in the knowledge that it would be many long months before I would see my family again or take up my scholarship at Oxford. It was a miserable moment when I looked out of the window of the train carrying us to the troopship in Southampton, only to see the ...”

“... a kitchen porter masquerading as a dentist who lived off his partner’s earnings as a prostitute. Paul Buckwaldt adopted the alias ‘Sherlock Holmes’. And Karl Hentschel – ‘such a nuisance’ in Steinhauer’s view – repeatedly blackmailed the German Secret Service by threatening to reveal the identity of his own source to the British ...”

“... same laugh as my father gave out when I said I wanted to be a film star. I think the great joke lay in the idea that we might go on holiday. In any event, we did eventually go on holiday – to Butlin’s holiday camp in Skegness – and the Moon came along very loyally. I was getting into poetry and the Moon was becoming a thing to conjure with for the ...”

“... she explored how changing visions of family relations in 18th-century French society lay behind the radical left’s hysterical demonisation of Marie-Antoinette, and, more broadly, behind the transition from a paternalistic monarchy to a fraternal republic. That book delved into 18th-century art and literature, gathering up representations of the ...”

“... could easily have been withdrawn. Why should Lebedinsky invent such a far-fetched tale if not to lay claim to a special intimacy with the tormented genius? The same wish seems also to underlie his account of Shostakovich’s becoming a Party member in 1960. Lebedinsky portrays himself as the composer’s confidant and conscience, warning him that ...”

“... disastrous Comet crashes, and decided to veto the planned V1000 jet on the grounds that the future lay with turbo-props, not jets. This meant that when the Boeing 707s appeared there was no British competitor, and when BOAC begged that Rolls-Royce engines at least be used in the Boeings, Maudling dismissed this obviously sensible (and ultimately ...”

“... But his, like Plutarch’s after him, was a lone voice. A huge industry of hunters and traders lay behind the Roman excesses, and took its toll: lions effectively disappeared from North Africa, tigers and elephants from Persia and the rest of Western Asia. The Old Testament launched the Judaeo-Christian tradition on a different course that was equally ...”

“... performance of Schoenberg’s music. Kokoschka wrote for the theatre. According to the playwright Paul Kornfeld, ‘a drama by Kokoschka is only a variation on his pictures and vice versa. Tone and melody, rhythm and gesture in his words are paralleled by the same effects in his pictures.’ Drama and spectacle, the arts as one, life as full-bodied ...”

“... in the Austrian Alps. His methods were in keeping with his approach to philosophy: he did not lay claim to any special authority and instead of expounding facts and theories he asked his pupils questions and left them to work out the answers for themselves. When Hermine happened to see him at work she marvelled at his capacity to hold their ...”

“... of sharp flowers. Or had I a responsibility to/Speak to society: though how could it hear me? It lay in its hotels.The toad persists through a martial German phase, a Keatsian cemetery-haunting phase, a ‘song of my sociologised self’ (‘Long angry flounce, tuned to piping self-sorrow … Suddenly charmed by community’) until she abandons the ...”