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“... her an atmosphere of something forbidden – and, I should say, very interesting.’ She went to Berlin in 1921, during the period of hyper-inflation, when actors, like everyone else, were paid in millions of useless marks: ‘You just stuffed it in a drawer and tried somehow to get rid of it,’ recalled Lenya. She met Weill in 1924, via the playwright ...”

“... a memoir by Stella Musulin, a friend of Auden’s during his years at Kirchstetten in Austria; Edward Mendelson’s bibliography of published letters by Auden; and a symposium on Auden’s great poem ‘In Praise of Limestone’. The overall standard of critical comment and editing is exceptionally high; the depth of knowledge revealed, especially in the ...”

“... of the LRB feel liberated by learning the details of female circumcision? In the same decade, Edward Sapir, analysing many North American languages, advanced the doctrine that a language reflects the way that its speakers understand the world – a way that may be incomprehensible without the language. Kant’s a prioris, structures of the human ...”

“... had a pronounced streak of family piety. Commenting on The Man Within, his rich uncle ‘Eppy’ (Edward) told him: ‘It could only have been written by a Greene.’ In his memoir, Greene stages his puzzlement at this remark: ‘I thought of my parents, I thought of all those aunts and uncles and cousins who had gathered together at Christmas, and of the two ...”

“... Wall, Rory reckons, reminded his father – a one-time ‘Cold War intelligence officer’ – of Berlin. Surely this wall too was first and foremost ‘a bureaucratic edifice of paranoia and surveillance’? The wall – constructed from 122 ad and running from the Solway Firth to the Tyne – also serves as a reminder that for two long periods in its ...”

“... own belief was that some things do not translate: ‘The Cherry Orchard is being translated for Berlin and Vienna. But it won’t succeed there because they don’t have billiards, Lopakhins or students à la Trofimo.’ Undeterred by this, or by Matthew Arnold’s ironic example of Mdlle Rossignol for Florence Nightingale, Hingley boldly translates the ...”

“... turned empty phrases inside out. The goat-like satyr on the front cover of Die Fackel suggests, as Edward Timms says, ‘that for the Kraus of the 1890s satire was a vaguely defined primitive force disrupting the civilities of a philistine society.’ But as the political situation worsened, Kraus embarked on the graver, more apocalyptic project of seeing the ...”

“... a precarious childhood in postwar Vienna; brief but exalted adolescence in the last days of Weimar Berlin; removal from Nazism to England and final ascent towards Cambridge, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. Touching portraits of his parents – hapless English father and fragile Austrian mother, both dead by the time he was 14 – sketch one psychological ...”

“... Here is how she grasped the nettle: ‘Everyone knows the tragic end. As the Russians surrounded Berlin, the Goebbels painlessly killed their children and then themselves. The dead children were described by people who saw them as looking “peacefully asleep”. Those who condemn this appalling, Masada-like deed must consider the alternative facing the ...”

“... those of countless other designer-directors, including Roller himself, as well as Jacques Copeau, Edward Gordon Craig and even Stanislavsky. Appia was above all a creature of the age of electricity, and for him the key to intelligent stage production was to have simple, lapidary sets subtly and imaginatively lit; lighting being the essential ingredient, as ...”

“... based in New York, is asked by one of the organisers of a festival of Chinese culture, held in Berlin, to assess a dozen or so translated novels that have been chosen as representative of modern writing in China. Danlin seems to accept the weakness of the domestic product, not suggesting for instance that something has been lost in translation, and says ...”

“... that was at the knee. Vast savings in labour and material could no doubt have been made if Captain Edward Molyneux or Captain Hardy Amies had come up with the mini-skirt, but there was trouble enough on the Home Front without pandering to what Hazlitt, contemplating Regency fashions, called ‘the greedy eye and rash hand of licentiousness’. The Germans had ...”

“... Thus Ascherson joins the oddly-assorted, lively company of Primo Levi, Oliver Sacks, John Berger, Edward Said and Germaine Greer – but from a slippery starting-point: the journalist is a specialist in nothing. Sometimes he seems to know that only too well, and to underrate his own contribution. Calling for work on the growing power of an undemocratic state ...”

“... faun of 72 who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde Park. Avedon’s assistants bustle round with lights, Avedon himself scarcely bothering to look through the lens, just ...”

“... a Polish peasant called Franziska Schanzkowska. She was hauled out of the Landwehr Canal in Berlin on 18 February 1920. The police found no identification on her and she refused to say a word. She was taken to the Dalldorf asylum and registered as Fräulein Unbekannt. It was here that a fellow inmate, Clara Peuthert, said to her: ‘Your face is ...”