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“... modernist, attending to tiny spines on the rostrum of a shrimp with the abstracting eye that Karl Blossfeldt brought to fiddlehead ferns or László Moholy-Nagy to the geometry of a city street. On the evidence in the Ikon exhibition, he was at once a sedulous describer of minute and alien naturalia, a well-connected amateur of the avant-garde, and a ...”

“... an underrated pleasure. It is like an evening spent in a restaurant – let’s say Olwen’s French Club, mentioned on page one, a latterday refuge of the Chelsea set – listening to a story of mutual friends. And it is a trip in its own right, on the teller’s part. T. Behrens gives the impression that he has more to say about himself than the ...”

“... himself, Julia and Rome into fantasy, a more eloquent medium than their polite foreigners’ French. Every family with a series of drawings by the gifted professionals and amateurs of the 19th century should get them out. The Taaffes must have thought they had in their possession nothing more than a quaint relic of a long-dead great-aunt, until Brigid ...”

“... With the inevitable exceptions of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Marx, it is doubtful whether any political thinker has inspired more sustained imbecility among his friends and enemies than Edmund Burke. And, despite first appearances, his appeal is far less predictable than theirs. Both Aquinas and Marx were in the first place theoreticians: the latter died at his desk, the former should have done ...”

“... Roman Empire began to snap. In September 1806 the Prussian Army entered Saxony hoping to halt the French advance, but Napoleon retaliated on 13 October by taking possession of Jena. His troops ransacked the town, and the following afternoon they defeated the Prussian Army in a battle on the plains nearby. These were gloomy days for the inhabitants of ...”

“... such as Fustel de Coulanges and Barthold Niebuhr. He even came to the notice of an irritated Karl Marx, who derided the ‘blockhead Maine’. By the 1880s, Marx had come to believe that the Russian village community, the mir, could provide the basic unit of a future egalitarian Communist society. He deplored Maine’s portrayal of such communities as a ...”

“... that this or that Western CP (usually the Italian, often the Spanish, less frequently the French) is becoming more and more eligible to join the ensemble of governing parties whose coalition or alternation in office is a regular, predictable and (for non-socialist liberals) acceptable linchpin of the state structure in several European ...”

“... making a film about the Napoleonic Wars. He enlisted more than a hundred extras to represent the French and other armies; the rate of pay for these extras was precisely the same whether they were playing officers or merely soldiers. Filming, which lasted several weeks, took place in open country, a long way from any town or village, so an open-air canteen ...”

“... About Hitler I can’t think of anything to say,’ thus Karl Kraus in a famous aside in 1935. But a great deal has been said about him ever since and no one has been better at saying it than Alan Bullock. His Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, published in 1952, is still the best biography, and one of the best books on the Nazi phenomenon in general ...”

“... aesthetic exemplified by the genius of Goethe! And, again, in the brief consideration of French Surrealism, Hamlet is missing from the play. With distance, it is becoming increasingly obvious that Marcel Duchamp is the seminal figure. There is hardly a strain in Modernism and Post-Modernism which does not find precedent and self-ironising ...”

“... France. When I first met him, in 1968, he was widely thought to be able to write only in French, but as time went on a strong personal vein and a taste for high comedy widened the scope of his writing and revealed a highly distinctive English style: intricate perceptions and sensations set down in long, baroque sentences, full of Gallicisms, argot ...”

“... I didn’t say goodbye, a labour of love rather than literature in which the surviving children of French Jewish deportees talk to a psychiatrist who shared their experience: ‘I didn’t have a youth, I no longer have a mother, I have a sister who needs treatment, a father who hasn’t been able to lead a normal life since he came back. An entire existence ...”

“... Karl Kraus had many enemies, but his friends and admirers are something of a liability too. They insist on his unremitting probity and passion for justice, but his justice was all his own – there was no one else on the bench. ‘His vision was never unsteadied by scepticism,’ Erich Heller wrote. Walter Benjamin asserted that ‘Kraus never offered an argument that had not engaged his whole person ...”

“... that George Soros had violated insider trading laws more than two decades ago in dealings with the French bank Société Générale. Soros has given billions of his personal wealth to fund liberal political organisations, notably his own Open Society Foundations, which operate on a global scale and have supported anti-totalitarian movements from Poland’s ...”

“... the European tradition of professional revolutionary practice (which indisputably begins with the French Revolution), but the intellectual source of this tradition. For Talmon the Jacobin dictatorship of Robespierre and St Just, the programme of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conjuration des Egaux, and their self-identified heirs from Buonarroti to Blanqui and ...”