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“... the ‘blink of an eye’ – that instant of conversion and spiritual rebirth when (as St Paul had promised) ‘we shall all be changed.’ But then, in 1933, Heidegger, along with a majority of Arendt’s compatriots, was transfixed by an Augenblick of diabolical consequence. Hitler’s rise to power convinced Heidegger that a rare opportunity was at ...”

“... made – the promise that when he died his sons would embalm him, dress him, pick out a casket, lay him out, prepare the obits, contact the priests, manage the flowers, the casseroles, the wake and procession, the Mass and burial. Maybe it was just understood. His was a funeral he would not have to direct. It was ours to do; and though he’d directed ...”

“... as exciting as we were led to believe. I’m thinking here particularly of a recent interview with Paul McCartney where he explained that when he and Mick smoked what he described charmingly as ‘pot’ together (after dinner, with a nice glass of wine apparently) all that happened was that they ‘discussed art’. I remember ’68, and let me assure ...”

“... and axles, it required, with its crank-handle, the brawn of Hercules to make it start. The future lay with gasoline. In 1908, Henry Ford’s mass-produced Model T, priced at a level which Ford’s own $5-a-day workers could afford, gave oil-based fuel (of which America was then the world’s main producer) a commercial edge. In 1912, the electric starter and ...”

“... son, Nick Willing, she describes bringing each painting-in-progress to the room where Willing lay, and asking him what she should do with it. His edicts were, in her account, unwavering. ‘Paint it all out,’ he’d say of something she’d just painted in. ‘You’ve got some beautifully painted figures there, and you’ve got rubbish furniture behind ...”

“... to bury her here in this house of warrior-celibates, whose ranks William had formally joined as he lay dying at Caversham, saying goodbye to her and to his marriage with a tearful kiss. That separation in death was the story of her life, as for so many military wives: she has stayed at home in the Wye Valley, entombed at Marshal’s pious foundation of Tintern ...”

“... and Thomas Mann; Josef follows a similar track. Adler was pressed into slave labour to help lay a railway line between Prague and Brno, then he was sent to Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and two subcamps of Buchenwald, Niederorschel and Langenstein. He puts Josef through all of that except Theresienstadt, which is reserved for the second novel in the ...”

“... by the government at the instigation of the communist minister of industrial production, Marcel Paul: they provided for pension and holiday entitlements, equal treatment of female employees, protection against arbitrary dismissal, and advancement on the basis of merit. These measures marked a major departure from traditional corporate culture. The CGT ...”

“... approach is to clear space around her subject, to return to the source where she can, and to lay out the versions and parts. It’s as if someone has turned down the music and switched on the lights and now you can hear what everyone’s saying. The two books complement each other.The scenes Nico moved through were managed by men and it is largely men ...”

“... a dull gold ground on the walls of the churches of Saint Germain-des-Prés and Saint Vincent-de-Paul, works in which the Greek and the Gothic are condensed into an exalted style that may one day be acknowledged as more original than the gross realism of Courbet. In these murals, Flandrin had made an artistic decision that was to have enormous ...”

“... fire in the leader column. For good measure, the paper consistently argued that Britain’s future lay inescapably in Europe. These opinions soon brought Hastings into conflict with right-wingers inside and outside the Telegraph. To political columnist T.E. (Peter) Utley, an exponent of mid-19th century Conservatism, he was not a gentleman. (Hastings was ...”

“... Bush’s more bellicose lieutenants saw it, the principal constraints on the use of American power lay within the US government itself. In a speech to Defense Department employees only a day before 9/11, Rumsfeld had warned of ‘an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America’. Who was this adversary? Some ...”

“... heart. The bookshops are small, and open all the time; on Friday there’s a market, when vendors lay out their books in Arabic and English on mats on the dusty and broken surface of the road. Most are second-hand. In the 1990s, after the first Gulf War, I used to walk around the district looking at books, often English classics once owned by ...”

“... rows are just as useful for blocking out other people as intense sex. Lawrence was completing ‘Paul Morel’, the draft for Sons and Lovers, at the time, and his inability to lay his own mother to rest is surely behind some of his more vicious insults. In ‘She Looks Back’, Frieda’s salty tears of ‘horrid ...”

“... Here she distinguished herself from her contemporaries: poets like Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Paul Blackburn often harked back to fraternal tropes of the knight, troubadour, jongleur. Never king. Guest’s origins were anything but kingly: born in North Carolina in 1920, she was shuffled around from town to town in Florida, where her father was an ...”