“... beard was felt to be potentially damaging to the studio, but a board meeting concluded they had no power to make him shave. This was the studio and the community in which, little more than a year later, and having taught himself cinema, Welles made Citizen Kane: still revolutionary, still dazzling half a century on. This was the community which, deeply ...”

“... morale of German troops in the last year of the First World War. When the Nazi government came to power in 1933, it quickly established a Ministry for National Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, who set about establishing control over the BBC’s German equivalent, the ReichsRundfunkGesellschaft (RRG), and put into production a cheap ...”

“... italics). Thus, in the context of a recently successful rebellion against the colonial power, what seemed most important was that the new government should not be tyrannical like the old one. The clause that became the First Amendment was a safeguard against overreach by the federal government, not an explicit guarantee of individual rights. The ...”

“... the 1970s: anti-war, anti-consumerism, anti-Nixon, anti-clericalism, a brief bout of workerism, ‘power to the people’ and so on. It was rickety stuff, but for most of the time he meant it, and within a few years of his liaison with Yoko, he had graduated from the knowing boy of the 1960s to the naive man-child we associate with his last ...”

“... But there is another, late emerging story. Vannier is a blackmailer. He holds the Murdocks in his power because he possesses a photograph that shows Mrs Murdock senior pushing out of a high window her first husband, a failing businessman whose only wealth was his life insurance. Throughout the eight years since her crime, she has loaded responsibility for it ...”

“... about the risks of foul water, but new concepts reinforced old sensibilities. In the 1780s, Thomas Henry, an English medic, wrote that ‘the drinking of putrid water is not only highly disagreeable and disgusting, but extremely noxious to the constitution.’ From the early 19th century, both private and governmental action was taken to make municipal ...”

“... all of this before large-scale US aid began flowing. Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to those of its neighbours and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with it, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so. Syria has lost ...”

“... the above beliefs. They might make more sense, indeed, than believing, for example, that nuclear power is safe, or that the United Kingdom shouldn’t be split up, or that putting people in prison is a way to prevent crime. My problem isn’t about belief itself, however, it’s simply a technical one: how do you create a religious or a non-secular ...”

“... Gunther emigrated to Holland with his mother, my father’s oldest sister, after Hitler came to power. In the summer of 1943, when he was 22 and she was 44, they were caught up in one of a series of raids on Amsterdam’s Jewish areas. Gunther, wearing a leather bomber jacket of the sort the SS favoured, started shouting abuse at his fellow Jews, was ...”

“... by Matthew Parris. Thatcher’s was a court and her courtiers just as cowardly as the courtiers of Henry VIII, and one can imagine some 16th-century Lord Butler justifying his master much as Tebbit and Bell are doing this evening. ‘It was unfortunate, of course, but the second wife had to go. She was impossible and yet, you see, His Majesty was genuinely ...”

“... choice in The Reluctant Fundamentalist of a form that’s unpopular in Anglophone writing: what Henry James called ‘the dear, the blessed nouvelle’. But the French term reminds us of the currency the novella has had in Europe, and that Hamid has said he was drawn to the genre by way of Camus’s The Fall. This makes things more complicated, not least ...”

“... she was 39. It was then that she entered a prolonged and intensive psychoanalytic treatment with Henry Lowenfeld, a Freudian with a special interest in art who had escaped Germany with his wife in 1938. She already had a good sense of psychoanalytic theory through her contact with the Surrealists in prewar Paris. Once in America, she became an extremely ...”

“... of events that showed that such a celebration was premature: in 2009 the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr was arrested and handcuffed by a white police officer while attempting to open his own front door; in 2012 Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old on his way home from a convenience store in Florida, was murdered by a neighbourhood watchman ...”

“... these are as marvellously implausible as, for example, the expression ‘in fine’ – perhaps Henry James might be a candidate if we accepted that criterion. F. Bastian, in his book on Defoe’s early life, makes attributions on the basis of (inter alia) certain ‘Defoisms’ which turn out to include tags such as hinc illae lachrymae. Such items of ...”

“... in the Marines observed. ‘You make me do the most extraordinary things.’ Waugh’s witch-like power of making everyone he knew into characters who danced to his tune, puppets in his own interior pantomime, did not ideally suit him to army life. Nor did things improve when his friend Major-General Sir Robert Laycock arranged for his transfer from the ...”