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“... a first law’. For an unproblematic description of this law is neither easy nor straightforward. Ludwig Boltzmann, the greatest physicist of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, spent most of his career trying to define its meaning and clarify its basis. Now Carlo Cercignani, a mathematical physicist working in Milan, tries to explain the importance of Boltzmann’s ...”

“... In the spring of 1914 Wittgenstein gave a third of the annual income from his inheritance – 100,000 Austrian crowns – to Ludwig von Ficker, the editor of the journal Der Brenner, to be shared out between worthy poets. When Ficker chose Georg Trakl as one beneficiary, Wittgenstein said that he didn’t understand Trakl’s poems, but felt they bore the stamp of ‘genius ...”

“... women, all of them married to other men: Countess Marie d’Agoult, Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, and a spy named Agnès Street-Klindworth. The Selected Letters alone indicate more than that. One letter, to Marie, reads: ‘I want to tell you, too, of a kind of passion to which I abandoned myself for 48 hours. Don’t be jealous. It concerns the ...”

“... orchestra, had a blazing row with von Bülow, stomped out of the pit and had to be coaxed back. Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who sang Tristan to his wife’s Isolde, caught a chill on stage and subsequently died; on his deathbed he is said to have called out Wagner’s name. His wife abandoned her career after his death. ‘I drove you to the ...”

“... temptation – Mach was his first philosophical enthusiasm. His political mentor was Ludwig von Mises, famous for his denial of the mere possibility of a socialist economy, and his uncompromising defence of a pure model of free-market capitalism. There was no more outspoken champion of classical liberalism in the German-speaking world of the ...”