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“... and architects arrived in London, the Hampstead coterie was invigorated by émigré friends. Herbert Read had visions of a British Bauhaus when Walter Gropius arrived from Berlin, László Moholy-Nagy taught Hepworth how to make photograms and Berthold Lubetkin designed the penguin pool at London Zoo. There was an ...”

“... as intellectually fatherless and thus serially dependent on spiritual surrogates such as Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer. This seems a bit mean to Oskar Wiesengrund, the wine merchant who bankrolled his pampered young son. Adorno (who dropped the ‘Wiesengrund’ during his American exile), belonged to a generation of German Jews who rebelled ...”

“... loan-jobbers, forestallers and other wartime profiteers accused of ripping off ordinary people. Walter Scott, part of a cavalry troop raised to ensure stability on the home front, the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons, found his conscience troubled when he was confronted in the line of duty with the looting of a bread shop: ‘Truth to say it was a ...”

“... and, they went so far as to suggest, the secret of the RAF’s success in night-time raids. Walter Spradbery’s image of Temple Church for the ‘Proud City’ posters The carrot campaign was one of hundreds waged in Britain and the empire with posters, leaflets and films throughout the war. By turns advisory, exhortatory or simply informative they ...”

“... friendships with members of the British elite, including the Tory politicians Bob Boothby, Walter Elliot and Harold Macmillan (later his publisher). The most important of these connections, as Hayton shows, was with Blanche Dugdale, known to her friends as ‘Baffy’. She was the niece of the former prime minister Arthur Balfour, the wife of Edgar ...”

“... in 1990, ‘and his wives were all dull too.’ There was also the obligatory black sheep, Herbert, who drank and lost jobs yet nonetheless managed to do the odd spot of spying along the way (for the Japanese, as it turns out, but still, the important thing is not to be boring, and old Herbert was frightfully ...”

“... past lives on. It was fostered in the early years by émigrés from the East. Popular writers like Walter Görlitz also did their bit to sustain pious legends. Then, around the late Seventies, the celebration of Prussia acquired newly fashionable status. In 1979, the best-known liberal historian in the Federal Republic, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, lamented that ...”

“... England’s distinctive sense of self? Probably the most useful descriptor is Whiggism, after Herbert Butterfield’s incisive dissection in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) of the tendency ‘to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present’. There ...”

“... dramas on Biblical themes. In the first half of the 17th century most major English poets – Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Crashaw, Cowley – were bilingual in English and Latin, and the few who weren’t bilingual could jog out a few elegiacs for their friends. Something went horribly wrong with this tradition of writing. By the early 20th century ...”

“... and sister of Charles Stewart) take on an almost fictive existence, like characters in a novel. Herbert Horne and Yeats’s view of him, Yeats’s ‘hushed, musical, eerie’ manner of speaking on that night in Southwark, as well as Crilly’s recent trial on a political charge, all become intensely present, so that a hasty scrawl in a London editor’s ...”

“... question asking for Amy Winehouse’s ‘Love Is a Losing Game’ to be compared with a ballad by Walter Raleigh. Here, in a lecture on comic timing, Griffiths reads a passage from Swift’s True and Faithful Narrative of What Passed in London alongside an article from the Evening Standard. Swift’s satire imagines the behaviour of various inhabitants of ...”

“... be knighted ‘for services to conservative newspapers and the imperial ideal’. Ivy’s father Walter was not one of these but a close friend of H.G. Wells and ‘a kind of paradigm of the progressiveness of his time: a zealot for education, a Fabian, a sympathiser with oppressed and obliterated nationalities, among them his own’. He lived by ...”

“... who should be represented, whether by loan or by purchase, was drawn up by her chief adviser, Herbert Read. According to Guggenheim, it was later revised by ‘Marcel Duchamp, Nelly van Doesburg and myself because it contained so many mistakes’. Works by many of the artists on the list were acquired in Paris just before the outbreak of the Second World ...”

“... War Cabinet, and the senior British military commanders in the Middle East, Lieutenant-General Sir Walter Congreve and General Gilbert Clayton. The generals contended that it was unnecessary to use Palestine as a route to Iraq’s oil and thought that the establishment of the protectorate would waste imperial resources better deployed elsewhere. Congreve and ...”

“... response has been a 100,000-word credo to show he can be a real politician like his grandfather, Herbert Morrison. The decision to write The Blair Revolution was made, Mandelson has explained, after reading a profile I wrote of him last year in the Guardian – ‘the single most damaging piece ever published about me’, he insists – which described how ...”