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“... how Tom comes to know it, too, as I’m sure boxing isn’t his thing. 22 January. I’m reading George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, a series of chapters, some more autobiographical than others, on the books he wishes he’d written. The first section is on the Cambridge scholar and scientist Joseph Needham, microbiologist and expert on China, a man ...”

“... promise of the 1920s that the world would recover and build a stable international order. Zara Steiner, among others, has obliged us to look again at that decade and treat it on its own terms as a time of achievement and hope. The world did eventually recover economically from the war and by the late 1920s production in most European countries had reached ...”

“... is, the archive joins in a long and curious tradition of praise for Kafka’s ‘pure’ German. George Steiner lauded ‘the translucency of Kafka’s German, its stainless quiet’, remarking that his ‘vocabulary and syntax are those of utmost abstention from waste’. John Updike referred to ‘the stirring purity’ of Kafka’s prose. Hannah ...”

“... same year, at the Organisation of African Unity summit in Khartoum. To Britain’s disgrace, as George Ivan Smith points out, it will be remembered that Uganda Airlines flights to Stansted, where Amin bought the Western luxury goods that kept his inner circle loyal, went on until 4 March 1979, when the Tanzanian Army was on the point of ousting him. With ...”

“... full in the excellent Salmagundi, Berlin says that he likes the ‘positive’ examples of Lloyd George and Franklin Roosevelt, not least because they insulated their respective societies from socialism tout court. One assumes that, with his sense of history, he means the Lloyd George who was the patron of Field Marshal ...”

“... however, there are risks of oversimplification attached to this way of framing history. Like Zara Steiner, in her more recent study of the 1920s, The Lights That Failed (2005), MacMillan is critical of latter-day commentators who blithely condemn the Paris Conference as a failure that placed the Second World War in the wings. Yet to focus on an apparent ...”

“... Being by trade a poet of plain language – William Carlos Williams would be another hero, also George Oppen, also Eileen Myles – Nelson finds her artistic focus drawn in two main directions. On the one hand, she crafts her words until she gets them to ‘facet’ as accurately as she can: ‘How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this ...”

“... about post-Enlightenment man. By the early 20th century the aggressive bourgeois ego which George Santayana saw emerge in the industrialising US – the go-getting American with no higher aim than diligent imitation of the rich – was already under siege in Europe by oversized and complex political and economic systems. Sociologists had identified ...”

“... as SCALP GRANDMA THEN ROB HER The paper is owned by a British newspaper magnate, Sir Gerald Steiner, which is as close as Wolfe’s prudent libel lawyers have allowed him to get to Rupert Murdoch and the New York Post. For a New Yorker like Wolfe, Murdoch evidently rates as a public emergency scarcely less serious than Aids. (Oddly, the only PWA in the ...”

“... don’t seem to have spotted much along the way. At one point they fasten onto an uninteresting Steiner Centre near Baker Street as an ‘example of expressionism’ in the capital, seemingly unaware that they can find a far more vigorous, original and powerful example in the form of Cachemaille-Day’s St Saviour’s Church in Eltham. Nearby, they would ...”

“... as well as Gide and Valéry (both of whom he translated into German), Claudel, Cocteau and George Bernard Shaw. Of his contacts with the public figures of his age Leppmann writes: ‘In their ambience he was one of the few people who represented no personal or party interests; who sought no diplomatic, military or economic information and no ...”