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“... opening words – epigraphic if not actually placed as an epigraph – are by the historian Marc Bloch: ‘L’historien ressemble à l’ogre de la fable. Là où il flaire la chair humaine, il sait que là est son gibier.’ It is a potent image, at once menacing and playful. The historian is like the ‘ogre of fairy tales’ because when ‘he ...”

“... cultures have been attracted for millennia. I think sometimes of the great French historian Marc Bloch on the brink of death: the teenage boy to whom he was handcuffed as the two were about to be executed by the SS in the summer of 1944 was terrified. ‘This will hurt,’ the boy cried. ‘No, my boy, it won’t hurt,’ ...”

“... Question: What is the basic idea in your philosophy? Bloch: That I cannot see anything at very close quarters, anything that presents itself in front of my eyes. There has to be distance ... Proverbs express it very simply: ‘The weaver knows not what he weaves’; ‘At the foot of the lighthouse there is no light’; ‘The prophet is without honour in his own country ...”

“... history since Machiavelli reduced to a code the wickedness of public men’. In 1941 the historian Marc Bloch tried to call time: ‘Robespierrists, anti-Robespierrists, we’ve had enough. We say, for pity’s sake, simply tell us what Robespierre was really like.’But it’s not so easy. It’s not only novelists who perpetrate fiction, and it seems ...”

“... always had a great meaning for me.’ A great meaning, and a special kind of horror. The historian Marc Bloch had this to say in 1940: The fact is that this dropping of bombs from the sky has a unique power of spreading terror … A man is always afraid of dying, but particularly so when to death is added the threat of complete physical disintegration. No ...”

“... smallholder property. The omission is all the more arresting in that it was here, precisely, that Marc Bloch located the originality of French agrarian history. The pivot of his great work on the subject is a comparison of the differing fates of the peasantry as their lords sought to resolve the crisis of feudal rents in Late Medieval Europe. In Eastern ...”

“... Hannah Höch. One could as easily add, say, Carl Schmitt on the (rare) intellectual right, Ernst Bloch on the far left and the great Max Weber in the middle. In 1933 only Thomas Mann and a few films had made much of a stir beyond the narrowest of niche-publics outside Central Europe, and possibly a small homosexual subculture which discovered the attractions ...”