“... they are ideas, so to speak, without ties to anything material, which might serve as a deterrent. Self-persuaded, they need no persuasion. As incarnate ideas, they have lost the power of thought, which may seem paradoxical till you reflect on it. These ordinary men, including fathers of families, have turned into syllogisms, and a syllogism cannot think but ...”

“... to our historical existence.’ This want, of course, if fully indulged, would lead poetry into self-deception – hence the countervailing presence of Prospero, whose covenant is with ‘truth’ rather than ‘beauty’ – ‘and a poet cannot bring us any truth without introducing into his poetry the problematic, the painful, the disorderly, the ...”

“... reappropriated. But the circumstances were now different. The Jewish cultural presence evinced a self-confidence, an institutional weight and a recognised legitimacy that permitted both the Jewish and the universal importance of the genocidal experience to be more aggressively affirmed. This was assisted by a recession of anti-semitism in the West, driven ...”

“... of this iambic tetrameter to set down some defiant certainties for the future, with no guilt, no self-questioning:Irish poets learn your tradeSing whatever is well madeScorn the stuff now growing upAll out of shape from toe to top,Their unremembering hearts and headsBase-born products of base beds.Sing the peasantry, and thenHard-riding country gentlemen,The ...”

“... to have around, which is the role I vaguely thought I filled.’ Motion calls this a ‘typically self-effacing judgment’ but it’s also a bit of a self-deluding one. It’s a short step from the jackboot to the book-jacket and by all accounts Larkin the librarian could be a pretty daunting figure. Neville Smith ...”

“... This was evident in the way the crowds behaved: the emphatic unity of the people, their creative self-organisation and improvised forms of protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline. Picture the march: thousands of men and women demonstrating in complete silence. This was a genuine popular uprising on the part of the deceived partisans of the ...”

“... her: “John Peel – what? You mean the dead disc jockey?” And then I said: “Don’t you mean Robert Peel? Cos if it was John Peel, we’d all be known as Johnnies.”’ This gets a really good laugh and Jim, who is cut from rather rougher cloth than the officers from the serious and organised crime squad, develops his theme. ‘I mean, speaking of ...”

“... have been a failed expedition to the east led by Ingvar the Far-Travelled. By contrast, a rather self-satisfied stone from Yttergärde in Sweden memorialises a man called Ulf, who took three ‘gelds’, or pay-offs, in England: one from Tosti (unknown, not King Harold Godwinsson’s brother), one from Thorketill (probably ‘the Tall’, a leader who ...”

“... buses had all stopped, so I had to walk about three miles home. The next day, after an overnight self-inflicted haircut that made me look insane, I was back at the Commons. The guards recognised me and would not let me into the Strangers’ Gallery. I saw the fire alarm button, broke the glass and set it off. Although no fire bells rang I was in ...”

“... price of gold; and they did this while cursing the work.’ (In his Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621, Robert Burton condemned ‘that pestilent booke’, ‘not to be read without shuddering’.) Minois delights in strange, Eco-esque vignettes of doomed book-hunting obsessives, like Christina, the daughter of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who criss-crossed ...”

“... also a good deal of repetition. We are reminded four times of Blake’s maxim, almost as often of Robert Burton’s admittedly splendid description of tears as ‘excrementitious humours of the third concoction’. But Dixon’s instinct for connections and comparisons is unfailingly sharp and illuminating. He ranges effortlessly from Margery Kempe ...”

“... force of repetition: Adler may have been introduced to these techniques by Kafka, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil or Alfred Döblin, but he mastered them by studying Goebbels and Eichmann and his clerks, whom Adorno called Schreibtischmörder, ‘desk-murderers’. The Nazi bureaucrats were responsible for two of the most malevolent fictionalising experiments of ...”

“... never more bombastic than in reports of the defeat at Stalingrad – on the need for self-sacrifice to keep Germany from going under. Stargardt claims that his book ‘offers a very different understanding of the effects that wartime defeats and crises had on German society’ from that offered by previous historians. The approach he adopts ...”

“... Happy Moscow, was never published in his lifetime, though it now has a fine English translation by Robert Chandler. The eponymous Moscow is a woman, not the city, though she floats around it doing some characteristic 1930s-Moscow things like parachute jumping (insouciantly lighting a cigarette in mid-flight) as well as having various dead-end love affairs in a ...”

“... by conspiracy theories, the scapegoating of minorities and fanfares of purportedly democratic self-congratulation. In Turkey Erdoğan has made cunning use of actual and threatened military coups against his regime to subvert democracy, in the name of democracy.* The seemingly quotidian category of democracy, so widely recognised that it seems to need no ...”