“... going. ‘We were blocked in the town, and at night they terrorised other villages.’ Then in mid-May there was a rumour that the KLA planned to attack the police and Albanians were advised to leave to avoid reprisals. The majority did, decamping to Malishevo and neighbouring villages to live with relatives and friends. Sherif Gashi, a retired primary school ...”

“... from the Field (2017), the former director of Iranian affairs at the National Security Council, Richard Nephew, described the sanctions as based on ‘objectives for the imposition of pain’, accompanied by instructions for ‘the conditions necessary for the removal of pain’. It’s the torturer’s schema, taken straight from the war on terror ...”

“... to write up a pretty good ‘pastiche of [his guests’] conversational style’. History may beg to differ. The early recordings are painfully stagey. The first, from 1951, features Margaret Lockwood (best known for playing feisty period heroines opposite James Mason, who himself did Desert Island Discs in 1961 and 1981) sounding as if she’s ...”

“... we last see her, she has hesitantly embarked on a career in television.) But while Frederica may have no intention of writing that ‘long novel by Proust out of George Eliot’, the long novels in which she figures are clearly marked by the genetic traces of that improbable couple – although their bloodlines have been hopelessly complicated by an ...”

“... Great Tradition – based on articles that first appeared in Scrutiny in the 1930s and 1940s – may begin by telling you the names of ‘the great English novelists’ (Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad), but the opening chapter then takes us through the failings of those who came before them. Defoe ‘matters little as an influence’. Fielding existed to make ...”

“... conceded later that there was something ‘morally repugnant’ about this – some of his reports may have affected his targets’ careers – but also said that ‘somebody has to clean the drains’: he thought what he did was ‘necessary’ while the Soviet Union remained a threat. He bolted from Oxford – this time to marry his long-term girlfriend, Ann ...”

“... watched their tongues when he was around. The rest, if they thought about it, imagined ‘Richard’ probably had to sign some nasty piece of paper in order to get out of Poland: so bloody what? After reading Domosławski’s compelling, exhaustive and often upsetting book, their easy tolerance – like mine – begins to look different. In the first ...”

“... herald hands over a paper, and the King reads: Edward, the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire; None else of name; and of all other men But five and twenty. The French have lost ten thousand, of whom all but sixteen hundred were persons of ‘blood and quality’. There is debate over the degree to which Shakespeare ...”

“... the ethics of journalism. Inevitably, he brings up the bloody communist coup in Barcelona in May 1937, and the way two British writers – Cockburn and Orwell – recorded it. Orwell had been wounded fighting with the vaguely Trotskyite POUM militia and found the crushing of non-Stalinist units and the terror used to hunt down their sympathisers ...”

“... was bestowed still the greatest honour that could have come my way.15 February. Good reviews for Richard Wilson’s production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Sheffield. In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or ...”

“... with new thousands of innocent dead, it will be the response of a nation merely. I fear that we may do that, but hope that we will not. By what we do now, and what we refrain from doing, we ought to wish to be seen to act on behalf of the human nature from which the agents of terror have cut themselves off. In the days after the planes hit, the US appeared ...”

“... The human fly’s rucksack is stuffed, skew, sleeping bag dangling like a spare arm. He may well have been an early-rising, walk-to-work rambler, appreciative of the ruled shadow-lines of the trees, the suddenly voluptuous blossom season; a man like myself, determined to respect his regular route in denial of the padlocked park gates. Rough ...”

“... Confederacy; a thousand American troops were killed or wounded. In the periodisation laid out in Richard White’s Middle Ground (1991), the irreversible decline of Indigenous peoples only set in at the end of the War of 1812, when ‘they could no longer pose a major threat or be a major asset to an empire or a republic, and even their economic consequence ...”

“... the war on terror; Israelis who descend from survivors of one holocaust are now creating another.Richard Beck’s Homeland supplies abundant matter for contemplation. He deftly reconstructs the coup d’état that unfolded in the corridors of power after 9/11, but also explores the darker reaches of the American psyche: the vicarious sadism; the Manichean ...”

“... and proceeded to turn it into ‘a brothel of shame’ and him into a nervous wreck. Whatever may have been Lukács’s need for self-punishment, expiation and redemption, it was this weird experience, typical of the Dostoevsky-dominated decade of the Great War, which brought him into contact with revolutionary politics. As to the disastrous affair ...”