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“... Burckhardt, William Thomson (known as Osman effendi), John Gardner Wilkinson, Robert Hay and Edward Lane also ‘went native’ on their travels. Like Champollion, they aped the robes and turbans of the Ottoman ruling class, browned their skin, and made a show of living in ‘Oriental’ style. Hay, Burton and Gardner Wilkinson took their sex lives ...”

“... grist to Constant’s radical mill, and he gleefully took on Bottom Dogs by the American writer Edward Dahlberg: a book so shocking that it was published in a limited edition of 500 copies with gilt tops at 15 shillings – double the normal price of novels. But when Arnold Bennett, then at the height of his fame as a critic, wrote that ‘it took you by ...”

“... Vienna State Opera decamped to London at the Third’s behest in 1947. Bertrand Russell, Isaiah Berlin, Tippett, Betjeman and Fred Hoyle became familiar voices. Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas made a poet’s living in what Thomas called ‘the thin puce belfries’ of the Third. Guided by the producer Douglas Cleverdon, Under Milk Wood and Beckett’s All ...”

“... reading to the merely knowable. Auden’s nursery library was also stocked with Beatrix Potter, Edward Lear and Harry Graham. And George had a passion for Norse legends, believing as he did that the Audens could themselves be traced back to the land of Thor: ‘In my father’s library, scientific books stood side by side with works of poetry and ...”

“... George Rylands (‘The Don as Performer’); John Sparrow (‘The Don as Dilettante’); Isaiah Berlin (‘The Don as Magus’). The scheme falters somewhat when we reach the Don as Woman. The token chapter on ‘Women Dons at Cambridge’, focusing on the unlikely duo of Jane Harrison and Betty Behrens (with a side glance at Eileen Power, who ‘dropped ...”

“... in such travels: he paid an official visit to Napoleon III in 1867, and spent time in London, Berlin and Vienna. He had therefore inspected the centres of other empires and would-be empires at close hand, and visited museums full of imperial loot and treasures. In 1876, Pedro II visited the United States for the Centennial Exposition in ...”

“... helping to shape the accepted image of Attlee as small-minded, stolid and pedestrian. Isaiah Berlin bemoaned his ‘minor public school morality’, and his capacity to ‘dehydrate’ any topic. Nevertheless, as a leader of the left, he did possess one curious advantage, which nowadays tends to go unnoticed: he looked the part. A bulbous, bald ...”

“... These are a few of the questions that motivate Trevor Paglen, an American artist based in Berlin. A geographer by training, Paglen was struck by the heavy redactions of aerial photographs from the US Geological Survey that he uncovered after the start of the Iraq War; they impelled him to fill in the blank spots on the maps, to register the black ...”

“... we would all want to be woken from. Too much money and too much mother; small wonder that Isaiah Berlin decided David Astor was ‘a neurotic, muddled, complicated, politically irresponsible, unhappy adventurer, permanently resentful of somebody or something … a typical poor little American rich boy’. But on the evidence of Lewis’s perceptive and ...”

“... When tricked or cheated, he neither brooded nor held grudges, focusing steadily on his interests. Edward Steichen, whose photographs of Morgan late in life are the best portraits we have of him, said that ‘meeting his gaze was like looking into the lights of an oncoming express train.’ Though given to sudden rages, he countered opposition coolly, with ...”

“... who are depicted as storm-troopers. As Knight notes, ‘that Warner Brothers’ own agent in Berlin had been beaten to death in 1935 for being Jewish makes this a credible argument, and . . . Wolfgang Korngold’s decision to stay in Hollywood and write the score was itself conditioned by Hitler’s move against Austria.’ Kevin Costner’s Robin ...”

“... the precise mauve shade of a pair of trousers she ‘saw but did not buy’ in a market in Berlin. One chapter is devoted to her enviable collection of swimming costumes – training Speedos, china-patterned vintage smocks, elegant black one-pieces – which are photographed like trophies.Midway through the book a note of unease creeps in. In her first ...”

“... but on a combination of reason and empirical observation. Robertson reminds us that when a Berlin pastor asked Immanuel Kant in 1784, ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’ (‘What is enlightenment?’), Kant answered that it was the process of growing up, achieving intellectual independence and thinking for oneself (Selbstdenken). Its motto was: ‘Sapere ...”

“... migration occurred at the other end of the social scale. Statistics for rental prices in Berlin in the period from the founding of the Reich in 1871 to the outbreak of the First World War demonstrate that the most expensive apartments were invariably on the first floor (the bel étage), the less expensive on the ground, second and third floors, and ...”

“... that Melville compares whale migration to the seasonal patterns of the fashionable, convenes in Berlin or Dubrovnik one summer only to divide and reassemble in Capri or San Francisco the next. (The peripatetic paradigm is Sir Stephen Spender, but Macdonald made an effort to run him close.) Third, he was an adopter of causes and had a pronounced tendency to ...”