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“... onto the brown strip of beach. A couple of women slouched over baskets of mangos. A boy wandered by to ask for money, then posed for a photo, droop-lidded and smirking, his dog-tags glinting in the twilight. Shiny SUVs with corporate insignia piled up along the loading ramp behind me, glamorous, outsized and out of place. Against the trace of the hills on ...”

“... with the West slowly but steadily eroded the ideological cohesiveness of the Soviet elites and by the time The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West in the mid-1970s, Soviet Communism had already lost what little intellectual cachet it had left in Europe. Both Russian and American culture were warped and disfigured ...”

“... silence, sometimes leaving the theatres in tears’. Gojira – or Godzilla, as he came to be known in English – was a fire-breathing dinosaur played by a man in a latex suit, but his destruction of Tokyo wasn’t played for laughs. Ishiro Honda, who directed the movie, had passed through Hiroshima after the ...”

“... biggest invasion in human history, dwarfing even the Normandy landings. In this case, D-Day was to be 1 November 1945. An American army of five million men was to be assembled for the invasion of Japan, with smaller but still significant contingents from Britain, Australia and the rest of the Commonwealth. Despite an ...”

“... The Maxim Gorky, a giant airliner built with money raised by the Union of Soviet Writers and Editors in 1934, was like nothing that had gone before it. The wings of the Tupolev-designed plane had a span of more than sixty metres, the same as a Boeing 747’s. It was driven by eight massive engines, generating between them 7000 horsepower ...”

“... for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people racialised as black have been in Britain for more than two thousand years. During the third century, North African Roman soldiers formed part of the occupation of the British Isles: ‘Aurelian Moors’ were ...”

“... on the cover of this Library of America collection of her stories, plays and other writings is by Carl Van Vechten, and it is one of those images that seems to demonstrate the soul is real, like spirit photography. My study of Carson McCullers began when I was a teenager, as any study of her should. On one of our family outings to the bookstore, I picked ...”

“... man and liberator of the slaves, has been the subject of more than 16,000 books, according to David S. Reynolds’s new biography, Abe. That’s around two a week, on average, since the end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be found in the historical literature, including the moralist who ...”

“... attempts to imagine, classify and explain possible modes of political life have been characterised by starkly polarised and stylised antinomies. Among the most familiar are Aristotle’s nature and convention, Sir Henry Maine’s status and contract, Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Michael Oakeshott’s ‘Societas’ and ...”

“... mint cakes, asking if he fancied one. Often it is an apparently incidental thing that turns out to be a depth charge. The Dylan soundtrack reveals how much Stoppard is a child of his generation, how much the boy from Eastern Europe belongs to the West, but Lee excavates from it something of more particular interest, pointing out that the word ‘home’ rings ...”

“... By the time​ H.G. Wells died, in August 1946, the genre he’d done more than anyone to establish was headquartered on the other side of the Atlantic. John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke, the most important British science fiction writers to emerge after the war, published in the pages of American magazines. Attempts to revive the domestic scene failed to gather momentum until 1954, when New Worlds – a former fanzine which the editor, John Carnell, had managed to keep sporadically in print – was purchased by the trade publishing firm Maclaren’s and began coming out monthly ...”

“... in the Comédie humaine.) Balzac’s significance in the history of the novel was fully apparent by 1905, when Henry James said that his ‘achievement remains one of the most inscrutable, one of the unfathomable, final facts in the history of art’. Of course, not all Balzac’s contemporaries agreed on the quality of the work; some complained that his ...”

“... 1969 suggested that two-thirds of the population had read at least one of the Astérix books; and by the time of Goscinny’s death total sales in France are said to have amounted to more than 55 million copies, putting Astérix substantially ahead of his main (Belgian) rival, Tintin. The first French space satellite, launched in 1965, was named in his honour ...”

“... the diasporas, the ghettos: repeated down the generations, the religious year itself structured by their commemoration. Who’s to say if one was a little earlier or a little later?The Venetian ghetto was founded by Senate decree on 29 March 1516. The doge was Leonardo Loredan. ‘No God-fearing subject of our ...”

“... seagull there, a wingspan from something prehistoric. You didn’t need to know what it was, or to be reminded of the albatross’s association with luck or guilt or human burden, or even to understand how far this one must have travelled, to see the majesty and melancholy in the creature’s remains. This was Coleridge’s harmless bird ‘that loved the man ...”