“... folks in all parts of the world.’ These connections have been discussed more recently by David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen in The Kaiser’s Holocaust (2010), and by Juergen Zimmerer in From Windhoek to Auschwitz? (2019). The links between the genocide in South-West Africa and the Holocaust depend on something else that Zimmerer makes clear: the ...”

“... small fry off with razor grins; nothing ain’t change but color and attire ... Walcott evidently means to identify himself with Spoiler. Classically educated and widely travelled, he can’t share in the brave new optimism of Independence and Black Power. He sees the old inequalities persisting – ‘black still poor, though black is beautiful’ – and ...”

“... v. Leviathan’, to borrow Orwell’s own terms, are inclined to hit this over-dramatic, David and Goliath note, including the mandatory weapons-upgrade from slingshot to ‘battered typewriter’ (it wouldn’t do for the typewriter to be newish and in quite good nick). Orwell does seem to have been a brave man when put to the test, but to speak of ...”

“... adopted it in a decorous shape for his longest and most ambitious work, The Moralists. David Hume, whom Diderot befriended in Paris in the 1760s, used it to scandalously sceptical effect in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, unpublishable until after his death. Diderot’s most famous work is a dialogue: Rameau’s Nephew, in which a ...”

“... the Inspectorate reported in 1995; and again in 1997: ‘the control of train movements by means of a signalling system is absolutely fundamental to the safe running of a railway.’ Yet I can find no evidence that any analysis was done to measure the cost of installing electronic signalling as against the benefit in lives saved. Had it been done, I ...”

“... substance. The form of assembly politics allowed the staging and managing of collective action by means of more or less ritualised behaviour and with a certain regularity; the substance dealt with the relations between ‘rulers and the political community’. A distinctively participatory politics entered European practice and consciousness, not just at the ...”

“... a language, not of peace, but of decolonisation. The Western world knows what ‘decolonising’ means. It means you leave. Your settlers go home, and you do not regulate borders that are not yours. The best you can hope for, as the Americans knew in the Philippines and the British discovered in Kenya, is a long lease on a ...”

“... the present – shouldn’t need repeating, though there’s a lingering literary prejudice which means that it does. Another way of putting it would be to say that good science fiction tells a number of particular untruths in order to reveal a more general truth, which is to say that it is in essence no different from any other kind of good fiction. Ballard ...”

“... self-denying heroines of earlier children’s literature: the moral had changed from ‘being good means giving up what you want’ to ‘indulging a desire for power brings out the darkness that’s inside you, kids’.The final volume of the first trilogy, The Farthest Shore (1972), ends with Ged going deep into the world of the dead to seal up a hole ...”

“... to the contrary. ‘The category “the West” does not seem to be in Donald Trump’s head,’ David Brooks wrote at the start of Trump’s second term. In The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, Alexander Karp, the head of Palantir, writes that ‘the West’ is ‘a concept that has been discarded by many, almost ...”

“... only Pinter continues radical and untainted by the Establishment. I’m not sure if this means that in Eagleton’s view I don’t qualify because of my absence of eminence or because such protests as I take part in are too sporadic and low-profile to be noticed. Either way if I had email I could send him or the Guardian a one-word ...”

“... support from celebrities, among them Rowan Williams, Emma Thompson, Grayson Perry, Noam Chomsky, David Byrne, David King (the former chief scientific adviser to the government) and Thunberg.Less well known is their following among lawyers, farmers (including livestock farmers), medics (last year the Lancet called for ...”

“... of feminised sentiment is carefully constrained in Dickens’s novels, but it remains the only means to heal division and disease. An unsettled childhood offers some explanation for these creative muddles. Dickens’s mother was lively and sociable, with a habit of irreverent mimicry that her son relished, and later imitated. He came to despise her ...”

“... happily recorded in her diary how he had begged her to ‘join him’ when he died, presumably by means of a suicide pact of the kind that brought so much posthumous criticism on Arthur Koestler, who got his much younger and perfectly healthy wife to ‘join’ him. Frances, however, was concerned only that she might die first. Happily, she survived him by 27 ...”

“... money to a regional branch of the Communist Workers League; but the will was unwitnessed, which means it’s not valid under Swedish law, so his entire estate has gone to his brother and father. The estate, close to worthless at the time of his death, is now a multi-million-dollar concern. This has led, unsurprisingly, to acrimony. Larsson had been in a ...”