“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it has any lasting value, it must be to the social historian with an eye for the vagaries of upper-class behaviour. The editor, Philip Ziegler, tells us that the King (George V) felt that an extended imperial tour by his first-born would not only strengthen ties of friendship but weaken the infatuation felt by his son for Mrs Dudley Ward. This cure for love ...”

“... reign, Naphta enjoys unprecedented prosperity; but after his death, the neighbouring kings make war on Naphta, and Naphta is utterly destroyed. Calasso’s interpretation of the story is characteristically opaque: ‘The legend of Kasch teaches us that sacrifice is the cause of ruin, but that the absence of sacrifice is also the cause of ruin. This pair of ...”

“... sit up, As well as exhibiting a tense familiarity with the habits of the English upper-middle class – the village fête, the rectory tea party, ‘the damp beehive in the summer-house’ – they were themselves impeccably well-bred: Joyce, Kafka, Baudelaire, a dash of Conan Doyle. In the late Twenties these were fashionable names. Best of ...”

“... along, until exactly what he is saying sinks in: namely, that all London’s surviving working-class children eked a precarious living, shovelling horse-shit from the path of their betters’ patent leather shoes. There was undoubtedly a lot of it going on, but not that much. As Mayhew testifies, there seem to have been no more than a few hundred juvenile ...”

“... inventor who was old enough to have served in the Forty-Second Illinois Cavalry in the Civil War. His first and favourite brainwave was a pneumatically-driven street-car, which failed because the mechanism could never be made leak-proof (for the record, Pilbrow’s Atmospheric Railway and Canal Propulsion Company involved British investors in big losses ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... solace can his swimming provide? Only the focus of the rush of fear, the primitive excitement of war: ‘Get the rhythm going ... Get a little high ... After the adrenaline of Vietnam, a six-pack ... just don’t cut it.’ A good many of the men and women in Jones’s fiction try to find a temporary release from pain in alcohol; but whisky, rum and tequila ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”