Saturday, 29 April 2023

Everything from this period was bad for the reputation of Belgium! So they showed nothing.

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There was a rule in the Foreign Ministry archives. They were not permitted to show researchers material that was bad for the reputation of B...
Friday, 28 April 2023

The effect on anyone who read those stories could be only that of overwhelming horror

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And so the statements [on the atrocities in the Congo] continue, story after story, by the hundreds. Here at last was something the rest of ...
Thursday, 27 April 2023

An Italian who considers his charm and good looks will enable him to get away with anything

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Bismarck, no fool, scribbled a comment in the margin beside this passage: "Swindle." Beside a passage about a confederation of fre...
Wednesday, 26 April 2023

Righteous denunciations poured down on a distant, weak, and safely nonwhite target

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Significantly, British and French antislavery fervor in the 1860s was directed not at Spain and Portugal, which allowed slavery in their col...
Tuesday, 25 April 2023

I had witnessed the last parade in my lifetime in which German soldiers would goose step

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Goose-stepping, grey-uniformed infantry, the unhappy heirs to the Prussian martial tradition, seemed keen to demonstrate their superiority o...
Monday, 24 April 2023

It is hard to recall today how robust and energetic London was in the 1980s in standing up for the rights of Central European intellectuals

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It is hard to recall today how robust and energetic London was in the 1980s in standing up for the rights of Central European intellectuals ...
Sunday, 23 April 2023

A sense of the absurd married to an inflexible observation of the rules of etiquette

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She [Countess Bianca Maria Colomba Korvin] came to personify for me more and more all the qualities of the Habsburg world: perseverance, cou...