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“... hear about that: it is held to be a tasteless riddle. This is a comedy to make the reader doleful. Don Bloch, an American, writes about hospitals and medicine without any attempt to be funny. The Modern Common Wind is about leprosy in Kenya and could fairly be advertised as ‘not for the squeamish’. The narrator is supposed to be an African and the ...”

“... Question: What is the basic idea in your philosophy? Bloch: That I cannot see anything at very close quarters, anything that presents itself in front of my eyes. There has to be distance ... Proverbs express it very simply: ‘The weaver knows not what he weaves’; ‘At the foot of the lighthouse there is no light’; ‘The prophet is without honour in his own country ...”

“... against the counterfeit of women’s fascination and the seductions of their tongues. As Howard Bloch points out in his short and combative study Medieval Misogyny, the flesh was seen as feminine, set in opposition to soul or mind, and the spirit wears the body like a concealing garment; to adorn this fleshly raiment with yet more artifice and paint doubled ...”

“... the Patrologia Latina (218 volumes) and the Patrologia Graeca (166 volumes). But, as R. Howard Bloch explains, Migne not only herded all the Church Fathers together and sold them using marketing techniques that are a Modernist work of art in their own right, he also published four hundred other books under the collective title Bibliothèque universelle du ...”

“... If the function of music in Bloch’s philosophy is that of parable and metaphor, detour and short-cut, the case against dissociating such excursions from their philosophical base is not inconsiderable. But the 1974 anthology, Zur Philosophie der Musik, was excused from answering it by the personal significance it manifestly had and by the historical one that the Busoni volume enhanced ...”

“... French ancestry derived from a 17th-century Nantes wine-merchant whose name was Moses Belloc or Bloch, and reminds us that Bloch is the name chosen by Proust to mark the unambiguously Jewish family with which the young Marcel tangled for a time, so perhaps during the months that the young Belloc chose to spend as a ranker ...”

“... as rather grand paperbacks, along with an eighth, a final hardback selection made by Michael Bloch. They all have titles like Ancestral Voices, Caves of Ice, Through Wood and Dale, Midway on the Waves and Prophesying Peace, and it will not escape the notice of the literate public that they are all derived, one with a bit of a spin on it, from ‘Kubla ...”

“... to Calcutta, he wrote to Ellis, he had read the Iliad and the Odyssey, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Don Quixote, Gibbon on Rome, Sismondi on France, Mill on India, ‘the seven thick folios of Biographica Brittanica’ and ‘the 70 volumes of Voltaire’. Once there, he took to ‘passing the three or four hours before breakfast in reading Greek and ...”

“... world. But, as he disarmingly reminds us, there is worse literary company than Lovecraft, Leiber, Bloch, Matheson and Jackson. ‘I could, for example, be an “important” writer like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a “brilliant” writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods ...”

“... problem is that the artist novel faces form-problems and contradictions of its own, which Ernst Bloch identified in a famous series of essays. For it is not enough to tell the reader that your protagonist is a genius, you must prove it somehow. But how? By inserting a work within the work, and giving a sample of his achievements (which may well be better ...”

“... supreme creation known as the individual may hold untrammelled sway. Discussing the prosody of Don Juan is all very well, but how on earth did Byron get to Sintra on a club foot? As far as such literary prurience goes, Claussen remains high-mindedly Teutonic. Beyond a discreet allusion to the fact that female students found him attractive, a fact the ...”

“... opening words – epigraphic if not actually placed as an epigraph – are by the historian Marc Bloch: ‘L’historien ressemble à l’ogre de la fable. Là où il flaire la chair humaine, il sait que là est son gibier.’ It is a potent image, at once menacing and playful. The historian is like the ‘ogre of fairy tales’ because when ‘he scents ...”

“... with three servants, sent his sons to public schools but never took a holiday abroad. Today no don can afford to buy a house there, and few can pay boarding-school fees; so a professor has more choice how to spend his income (which, Brooke might have added, is less in real terms than a professor’s income sixty years ago). To Brooke the pest’s inquiries ...”

“... note: I could live and I do not live. The second major reason – perhaps it is all really one, I don’t seem to be able to sort them apart now – is the idea: ‘What I have toyed with is really going to happen. I have not bought myself off by my writing. I died my whole life long and now I will really die. My life was sweeter than other people’s and my ...”

“... on the court. He had just been elected to the Académie française, but had not yet had time to don the green and gold, grip his sword and be received among the Immortals.But well before the end he had begun to express misgivings. Certainly, Gaullism and Communism were for all practical purposes extinct. The Socialist Party had abandoned its absurd ...”