“... a journalistic sinecure in the most reactionary Prussian government of the century (a position he held for the next twenty years). Tallhover’s surveillance of Theodor Fontane is not recorded in Schädlich’s novel; and in any case, Grass’s Hoftaller is a far jollier figure, who intervenes fully as much to protect the sometimes naive Fonty as he does to ...”

“... Rochester’s poems was made by Vivian de Sola Pinto for Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1953. In 1968 David Vieth produced an edition of 76 poems plus eight more listed as ‘Possibly by Rochester’; 75 of his attributions and usually his choices of copy-text were accepted by Keith Walker for his edition for Blackwell’s in 1984; to the 75 Walker added six new ...”

“... do I think ...’ Much of what critics like Louis Menand (in the New York Review of Books) and David Denby (in the New Yorker) have said about Eyes Wide Shut is true. The timing is terrible, the dialogue is wooden and Tom Cruise is worse than you can imagine any reasonably competent actor could be. He has only one gesture – a sketch of a wave of the ...”

“... The archives in Portbou and neighbouring Figueres are full of oddities, carefully laid out in David Mauas’s documentary film Who Killed Walter Benjamin? (2005). They have opened the field for speculative interest about Benjamin’s death. In 2001 Stephen Schwartz, a Trotskyist-turned-Sufist who has always seen the hidden hand of the evil ...”

“... waving cushions and towels, and some were leaning out. It happened that one of the firefighters, David Badillo, knew two of the uncles, Carlos and Manfred Ruiz, from the sports centre – they had all worked there as lifeguards – and Melanie gave Badillo her keys to their flat, 176 on the 20th floor. (They still hadn’t heard from Jessica.) Badillo went ...”

“... it was another life, or the same life another time, was immaterial. Terror, for the most part held at bay during the hours of daylight by sheer forgetfulness, settled in as the daily routine wound down, and I had said my prayers and been settled into bed. Physically alone at last, I would be caught unawares by the sudden sight, through the net ...”

“... looms, nature documentaries have become big business. The last six years have seen a succession of David Attenborough hits: Blue Planet II, Dynasties and Dynasties II, The Green Planet and Frozen Planet II on the BBC; and on Netflix, Our Planet, A Life on Our Planet and Planet Earth II. Attenborough’s most recent series, Wild Isles, was watched by more than ...”

“... culture as a foundation for dictatorship. Russia, he wrote, was a country where ‘absolutism had held sway for centuries, where men have been taught to obey and not to think, to prostrate themselves and not assert themselves, to bow and not to shake hands.’ Brzezinski’s thesis challenged Western scholarly wisdom, which depended on the assumption that the ...”

“... promised by the trilogy – reliance on the same inscrutable mechanism could be held a more serious admission of limit, since the coherence of the whole narrative in a sense turns on this deus absconditus. As it happens, Hobsbawm does offer partial explanations of the Great Depression of the 1930s, of the boom of the Golden Age, and even ...”

“... dramatically lowering the cost of US goods compared to those of its main competitors. Employers held real wage growth close to zero for the whole decade. The Reagan Administration slashed corporation taxes. While investment continued to stagnate until 1993, companies shed masses of high-cost, low-profit means of production and labour in order to raise ...”

“... from which the army proposed to shoot down airborne threats to the 2012 Olympics, which were held a mile from Quinn’s old house. The borough teems with estate agents. Private developers are building and marketing flats along the Tower Hamlets stretch of the Regent’s Canal – which not that long ago was a ...”

“... skill, composed in what he claimed was ‘the true Ciceronian’, with each main verb cunningly held back to the end of the sentence. According to Johnson, he was a remarkable instance of ‘how far impudence may carry ignorance’. Taylor himself – my John Taylor – later became oculist to George III, a job he shared with his brother. The post was ...”

“... much heart.Reitlinger devotes a substantial number of pages to Eichmann and concludes, in a phrase David Cesarani quotes, that Eichmann’s ‘career was that of a German civil servant, absorbed in his work and getting no glory for it’. Reitlinger didn’t fail to recognise his significance in the murder of millions of Jews but, like Arendt later on, he ...”

“... mighty neighbour to the north, and the way the fiction of the frontier, which was not our fiction, held us in its sway. What’s special about the Western? The cowboy hero, as Robert Warshow said in his essay on the genre, carries a gun but uses it only when he must: the Western doesn’t just tell violent stories, it tells stories about the meaning, the ...”

“... the Amherst College Library, when it fell (rose?) out of an acid-free envelope. If I had not held it lightly in my hands, I would never have suspected the manner in which it was assembled … Look at it here, flying on the page, vying with light.’ Behold, Werner’s sacramental tone urges, a saint’s relic, a fragment blessed with mystic ...”