“... seems to have preferred the expression ‘the Jewish Catastrophe’. At this stage ‘holocaust’ may have been more commonly attached to the prospect of nuclear war. The shift undoubtedly came in 1963 with the controversy surrounding Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which set in motion an intense public interrogation of Jewish conduct during the Nazi ...”

“... become the target of unreasonable blame. The second, sometimes contingently related dream is what may be called the fantasy of the middle ground. This depends, logically as well as practically, on the model of a spectrum. The spatial metaphor exerts its own semantic pull, and so those placed at either extreme of the spectrum must be described as ...”

“... being the buzzword for the shearing off of voter-unfriendly associations. Before David Cameron, or ‘DC’, as he’s known, took over in December 2005, Conservative strategists had noted anxiously that focus groups would turn against almost anything – even, or especially, tax cuts – as soon as they were told it was Tory ...”

“... of the many recent bad news stories about the NHS, its significance underscored by the fact that David Cameron felt it necessary to present the report to the House of the Commons himself, rather than leave it to the secretary of state for health. The public inquiry was set up in 2010 by the then secretary of state, Andrew Lansley, to investigate further the ...”

“... Seymour is willing to confess that Graves could be completely impossible. Facts matter, but they may reveal less about human beings than fictions. And if you want to get to know Graves, Goodbye to All That, despite its many inaccuracies, knocks the spots off any biography as a guide to his psychology as well as that of his class and of the generation who ...”

“... get less than 50 per cent of the primary vote, the hectic dramas of late-night scrutineering. Like David Malouf, who has spoken of Australian election days as unacknowledged national carnivals, Hardjono enjoys them hugely. Better than most in early October, she also knew that there’s worse than Pauline Hanson. The election, in which the conservative ...”

“... sophisticated thinking of a later age: for Herodotus the struggle is to retrieve actual facts. As David Branscome writes in Textual Rivals, ancient critics ‘found fault with Herodotus precisely at those times when they felt he did not live up to his perceived promise of delivering the truth’. It was no easy business for him: the real achievement of the ...”

“... Early on, Jones mounts a pre-emptive defence against an accusation he knows is coming. When David Aaronovitch smarmily remarks, one Oxbridge-educated staff journalist to another, ‘here we are, having our elite discussion,’ Jones tells the reader: ‘Some will claim that I am, myself, a member of the establishment. But it is not someone’s ...”

“... first novel’, adding the characteristic gloss that ‘failure too is a kind of death’ and so may conclude the story of a life as appropriately as one’s last breath. Greene had famously gambled his adolescent life on the odds that one of the five empty chambers of the revolver he held to his head would come up when he pulled the trigger (or so he later ...”

“... and approved them. ‘Prediction is dangerous,’ the TLS’s critic conceded, ‘but The Hobbit may well prove a classic.’ A few days later, another anonymous review in the Times endorsed this verdict: ‘All who love that kind of children’s book that can be read and reread by adults should take note that a new star has appeared in this ...”

“... denoting a cinema of some sort of absolute truth, which is why Rouch himself later abandoned it. David MacDougall is one of the leading anthropological film-makers of the generation following Rouch’s. Although never formally trained as an anthropologist, he has carried out more research in non-Western cultural contexts than most academic anthropologists ...”

“... writing his only history of science. It is still more surprising that it should come from David Wootton, an early modern intellectual historian whose 1983 study of Paolo Sarpi, a late Renaissance theologian, concluded by cautioning historians not to act as a ‘jury’. There are two stories folded into Wootton’s Bad Medicine: one concerns the ...”

“... French Revolution; most recently (in flashes) during the 1968 ‘events’ of Berlin and the Paris May. We, or our children, will see it again. In Barcelona and Catalonia, this epiphany was released (they wouldn’t have liked the word ‘led’) by anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists. Orwell arrived there in December 1936 to ‘fight fascism’ and walked ...”

“... his celebrants were some of America’s most esteemed foreign reporters and analysts, including David Ignatius of the Washington Post and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. But then, on 2 October last year, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and dismembered with a bone saw, causing outrage in the West. Even ...”

“... Kirk Douglas ‘in his crueller moments (see Ace in the Hole and Champion)’. Here, the events may be true (he’s at pains to tell us he has fact-checked the incidents with the main cast of agency characters): it’s just Clancy’s responses to them which sometimes seem as if life was imitating MGM. For instance, the book opens with a chase: Clancy is ...”