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“... was impossible to get the camps and the SS taken seriously. Bettelheim was imprisoned before the war in Dachau and Buchenwald, and has given his story in The Informed Heart. From personal experience he saw only what Germans were doing to Germans – and over the whole period of the camps up to 1945, what happened inside Germany was to be an almost ...”

“... advertisements in the personal column of the Times: ‘A good breast of milk available; first-class references’. Not that Esther, a betrayed kitchenmaid from a gambling-mad big house, can afford to advertise her bounty: she has to rely on word-of-mouth recommendation. In her penniless extremity she contracts to supply her milk to the baby of a well-off ...”

“... today had to dismiss six boys. They were found behind the tombstones with women of the serving class.’ The young Deedes found a job on the Morning Post. He felt sorry for the unemployed but lived in a Waughish world well removed from such miseries. He and his friends, finding a Mrs Trampleasure in the London phone directory, took turns ringing her to ...”

“... story ‘The Conductor’, in Love and Obstacles (2009): ‘I was not in Sarajevo when the war began; I felt helplessness and guilt as I watched the destruction of my hometown on TV; I lived in America.’ He means it’s boring in comparison with the character he’s discussing, a Muslim poet from Sarajevo who stays put for the siege and later awes ...”

“... desperate defiance of Hitler, but from the reader’s, necessarily, they are taking part in World War Two (1939-45), its end date fixed, its outcome known. It’s not easy to put aside our knowledge and inhabit their innocence. In The Stranger’s Child Alan Hollinghurst went to some trouble to shake the patronising certainty of retrospect, setting the first ...”

“... government of 1936-37. Already a prominent writer and government lawyer before the First World War, he led the French Socialists (officially called the French Section of the Workers’ International) for most of the interwar period. And he achieved his success despite appearing to French gentiles more conspicuously Jewish than nearly all other prominent ...”

“... resigned prematurely from the Foreign Office at the age of 49, shortly before the First World War. He was the senior British diplomat in Seoul and resigned, my father told me, because he objected to British support for Japan’s occupation of Korea. It was a reckless and somewhat mysterious decision: he was about to achieve ambassadorial rank, had no ...”

“... reads like Haddad’s code for 'fictionalise'. Otherwise, this smells like a set-up. Hasn’t the war in Iraq and its limitless dark fallout put paid to the sentiment of do-goodism and conventional notions of ‘truth’ and the ‘power of words’, particularly America-inspired ones? Rasa’s reflections come in a scene, early on, when he is trying to ...”

“... from such recent books as Jeremiah Dancy’s The Myth of the Press Gang and Isaac Land’s War, Nationalism and the British Sailor, but it does not suit his purpose to follow their arguments in detail, or to enter into the controversies which in some cases they have aroused. He writes mainly about warships (merchant ships are more difficult to study ...”

“... he ended his speech by arguing that Israelis had to prepare themselves for a permanent and bitter war, which would have a major role for what Israel called ‘frontier settlements’.Over the years, the ploughed ditch turned into a complex system of fortifications – a 300-metre buffer zone, where more than two hundred Palestinian demonstrators were shot and ...”

“... families, earning somewhere between $18,576 and $74,304. But this isn’t a rising middle class. In the last six years of the Eighties, it shrank from 71 per cent of all families to 63 per cent. Looked at another way again, the wealth of all but the richest 1 per cent declined on average in these years by a percentage point a year. Real incomes also ...”

“... legal adviser, William Pyne, and to his tailor, Richard Culverwell. There has been a long upper-class tradition of owing money to one’s tailor – which, no doubt, explains the inordinate prices charged in those days. Disraeli, characteristically, went a step further and actually borrowed money from his tailor, who, like most of Disraeli’s ...”

“... One new thread is nationalistic, even xenophobic, in the years when Europe was drifting towards war and Britain was engaged in a naval arms race with Germany. Hugh Owen, in The Poison Cloud (1908), blames his exterminating fog on the import of cheap, noxious foreign coal (disloyal British miners who strike have destroyed the native industry), and it is the ...”

“... with the worst of the breaking and burning done and an inkling of confidence among the political class that the ‘crisis’ is surmountable, Nicolas Sarkozy – who’d begun to look isolated in the government – has seen his position steadily improve. The public, no longer quite so nervous, has rewarded him for his outspokenness with a boost in his ...”

“... take it to the next cradle. It’s after Ursula has experienced for herself the end of the war in Berlin that she takes the decision to assassinate Hitler before he can become Chancellor. The moment of her death in 1945 seems to be a moment of particular insight. In a ruined Berlin, she decides to kill herself and her daughter (it’s the only timeline ...”