“... Otto Koch, commandant first of Majdanek and then Buchenwald, stole on the scale of a major drug lord. He was executed by an SS firing squad just before the war ended. In keeping with the KL’s macho ethos, he refused a blindfold. The needs​ of German industry in late 1943 and 1944 changed the KL as much as the Holocaust had in early 1942. Hundreds of new ...”

“... detail that the idea of freedom has gone hand in hand, for many white Americans, with the right to lord it over others, especially Black people and Native Americans, but also the victims of the country’s foreign adventures and, indeed, anyone who stands in its way, including its (former?) European allies. Freedom, as most Americans understand it, is the ...”

“... his political ideals had not attracted the support they merited, and that he had failed to bring home that ‘the predominant model of liberal democratic institutions’ in the Western world ‘necessarily leads to a gradual transformation of the spontaneous order of a free society into a totalitarian system’. To avert this fatal propensity, which Hayek ...”

“... World War, supposedly with some role in the surrender of Von Paulus at Stalingrad, before coming home damaged from the battle for Budapest in 1944. After the war this stepfather remained a fervent believer in communism, but not in Stalin, in time befriending others – mostly Jews like himself – who had returned from the camps. Observing such incompatible ...”

“... but having read his prose essay on the family, it was as if he was just versifying bits of it. ‘Home after Three Months away’ and ‘Man and Wife’, though, really hit me as what poems should be. There are about half a dozen poems that had that kind of impact on me: the passionate speaking voice and intimate subject-matter. The internal rhymes and basic ...”

“... nowadays they are all buried under concrete, except for the farm at Toddhill, which became a home for the mentally handicapped. In my youth they had been like haunted houses. There were echoes in the barns.Those farms seemed as remote from the daily reality of our lives as the one in the wedding picture. We would never live there: computer factories and ...”

“... Without it, he said, he and his men would have ‘looked complete fools with the government at home, having led them up the garden path to believe that Nehru would accept the plan’, and ‘Dickie Mountbatten would have been finished and could have packed his bag.’ The invaluable Menon was to hand, and the day was saved when he redrafted the plan to ...”