“... the ‘desire to abolish … capitalism’. Under a new speaker vetting scheme introduced by Jacob Rees-Mogg last year, eight people have been disinvited from speaking at government events, including Dan Kaszeta, a chemical weapons expert, and Kate Devlin, who studies the interaction between humans and technology. Both were told their invitations had ...”

“... description of it. She was a very real prisoner of her remembered history. Off the Road, at 429 pp., barely scratched the surface of what she wanted to say. Swathes of documentation, letters, had to be cut down or removed entirely. The picture she sketched, of the never-eradicated desire of the principal Beats for a lick at the American dream of the Fifties ...”

“... The yoking of supposedly high and low aspects of life isn’t new, it’s there in Lawrence, and John Cowper Powys finds in it a sort of transgressive holiness, but here it represents no more than a reflex of disgust.Before the ceremony a grieving relative had insisted on the coffin being opened, motivated supposedly by ‘a Huisgenoot article she read last ...”

“... Office agitated for foreign-language broadcasts to counter the propaganda of the Axis powers. John Reith, the director general, felt obliged to accept an arrangement that, as Potter puts it, ‘included agreeing that news editors would accept specific guidance from civil servants as to which items needed to be included in, or omitted from, different ...”

“... sergeant major is a can of McEwens lager.10 March. The Independent pursues its campaign against John Birt over his tax arrangements. On another page it boasts its acquisition of Jim Slater as its Stock Exchange commentator.13 March. To Weston to see Mam, who is dulleyed, expressionless, absent. The sun is hot through the blinds and the radio full ...”

“... most important claim that emerged from the 1967 war and became emblematic of American Judaism’, Jacob Neusner writes in In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (1993), was that ‘the Holocaust ... was unique, without parallel in human history.’ The ‘Holocaust uniqueness’ dogma became, according to Novick, ‘axiomatic’, a ‘fetishism’, and a ...”

“... context needs the expanded sense it doesn’t always have in English. Barthes is a moralist, as John Sturrock says in Structuralism and Since, because ‘moral passions and distinctions excite him,’ and his apparent flightiness is often a form of scruple, a refusal to lay down a badgering law. Sometimes it is just flightiness. Elements of Semiology both ...”

“... urge on me the attractions of the writer’s life, instancing the novels of Leo Walmsley or Naomi Jacob – even, going up the scale a bit, the Brontë sisters, whom she has never actually read, but thinks of as local girls who have kicked over the traces and made good Down South. The novelist and ex-Bingley librarian ...”

“... to a charge of second-degree manslaughter. In 1871, a Polish saloon owner who styled himself Dr Jacob Rosenzweig (he bought his diploma for $40) operated on a 22-year-old called Alice Bowlsby who died two days later of peritonitis. Rosenzweig stuffed her naked body in a trunk and tried to put it on a train to Chicago, a plan which went awry when railway ...”

“... novel which, in German literature, goes back to the 17th century: 1668, to be precise, when Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen published his Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus, a novel which, in sharp contrast to the contemporary courtly novel, is set among soldiers, actors, servants, beggars, robbers and whores. There are characters exemplifying ...”

“... of possible links between a violent past and present suffering. And they found something. In 1871 Jacob da Costa published a paper based on the cases of 300 soldiers whose strange somatic symptoms he connected to stress, but was unable to explain physiologically. It may be that the terror of charging into heavy enemy fire at close range as a lone unprotected ...”

“... he had sex with his dead brother’s wife. It was left to his father, Judah, the fourth son of Jacob and Leah, to do the genealogical work of getting from Abraham to David via the body of his daughter-in-law. Two aspects of Jesus’s story speak to the role of the imagination in the history of how and why we represent descent as we do. One engages the ...”

“... separated from the southern Catholic Netherlands, still governed by Spain, first in the person of John of Austria. By the end of the century, the ever more numerous Dutch soldiers came to be quartered in northern towns and villages, and it was their prerogative to plunder the countryside. A squad under an officer might emerge from town to waylay a rich convoy ...”

“... abound.In an essay for the New Republic in 2022 about Sacks and his isolationist, new-right peers, Jacob Silverman wrote:The symbolic epicentre of this movement is San Francisco, but really it’s the entire curdled utopian dream of California. In the eyes of rich techies who have seen their beloved metropolis fall into decay, vast inequality and social ...”

“... We are living through a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name in the Catholic Almanac Online ...”