“... treasures of his well-stocked mind, his poetic imagination, his mystical obsessions and his high camp sense of fun with anyone who was worthy, as well as with quite a few ... who were not. It was Jacob more than anyone else who taught Picasso to speak a French which was ‘idiomatic and witty, and on occasion eloquent (despite a heavy Spanish ...”

“... daring lies in its imaginative range, its matter-of-fact way of incorporating concentration-camp episodes into a large-scale realist novel with a dozen settings and scores of characters, each treated with impartial sympathy and curiosity. This man is a general, that one a physicist, the next, Eichmann. Grossman was also brave enough to equate the Nazi ...”

“... on him much of the virulence of the anti-British propaganda campaign run by the American Zionist camp. Yet when the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry recommended the immediate entry of 100,000 Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine and the eventual creation after a period of UN trusteeship of a binational state in which Arabs and Jews should have equal ...”

“... before, he decided to forget about his book and move on.When Wittgenstein got back from prison camp in Italy, he spent a year in Vienna training as a teacher, after which he worked with pre-adolescent children in a series of village schools in the Austrian Alps. His methods were in keeping with his approach to philosophy: he did not lay claim to any ...”

“... the US still has troops stationed at al-Asad airbase north-west of Baghdad (once nicknamed ‘Camp Cupcake’ for its luxuries). In Saudi Arabia itself, the US operates a military training mission based in Eskan village. Only Iran, which broke away from the US system in 1979, houses no American military bases. An agreement​ signed by British ...”

“... is. He gets all the points, is extraordinarily sensitive to people.’ Mead and Fortune set up camp on the shore of Lake Chambri near Bateson’s field site, and began a four-month study of Tchambuli fishermen and traders. The Tchambuli had been driven from their homes by the Iatmul – the tribe that Bateson was studying – and had returned only in ...”

“... called Duberry Ramsay, a Crimean War veteran, who had been put in charge of a temporary prison camp at Morant Bay, where he had prisoners flogged and hanged at random. He was charged with the murder of one of them, but in spite of clear direction from an upright Scottish judge, Alan Ker, the grand jury of local property-owners would not indict him. This ...”

“... its stranglehold on Victorian Oxford and Cambridge, whatever was happening in Göttingen – and William Morris’s many poems, romances and saga translations. Morris, indeed, perhaps deserves more space. He kept up with the scholarship, travelled in Iceland, knew the languages first-hand, and created a semi-socialist northern wonderland of his own in his ...”

“... idea of literature, and a peculiar division of labour between writer and reader. Their author, William Gaddis, who won the National Book Award with JR, might actually have felt short-changed by the accolade of the imprint, to judge by a riff in JR deploring the way ‘longer works of fiction [are] now dismissed as classics and … largely unread due to the ...”

“... the present interest in neuroaesthetics. (The other, a 1999 paper by Vilayanur Ramachandran and William Hirstein entitled ‘The Science of Art’ and published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, was a sparky jeu d’esprit; as Ramachandran later admitted, ‘We mainly did it for fun.’) Here was a clear-spoken, scrupulous expositor of science ...”

“... favourite English-language book). On the walls were photographs of Oscar Wilde, drawings by William Blake and examples of Walt Whitman’s early writings. Émigré writers and French intellectuals flocked there, and to the larger shop on rue de l’Odéon, where it moved in 1922. ‘From that moment on,’ Beach said, ‘for over twenty years, they ...”

“... in some way untypical, and here the accounts we have are largely those of the better-off. Lord William Nevill, Lady Constance Lytton, Jabez Balfour and the suffragettes: their views reflect the redoubled degradation felt by prisoners drawn from a better social class. In other words, his overall picture does not compensate sufficiently for the fact that, as ...”

“... ultimately more than eight hundred exiles, including most of the best brains in the evangelical camp. It was an exodus enthusiastically encouraged by the authorities, and in the early months of the regime Lord Chancellor Gardiner seems to have leaked advance warning of arrests, in the hope that the dissidents would take themselves off and save him the ...”

“... She joins the Cheka and in 1926 is promoted to deputy director of the Moscow region forced labour camp. She continues at this exacting post in a busy part of the Gulag until the early 1930s. We must not think that Ransome, as a foreign correspondent, was somehow shielded from the grim realities. On the contrary, his matchless contacts gave him access to the ...”

“... writes to Alfred Kazin in 1944, before reassuring the burgeoning critic that he belongs ‘in our camp’. Later: ‘The reviews are incredibly vulgar, so why read them?’ One can applaud a novelist for not reading his reviews, but not reading them and obsessing about them for 60 years? This is what we might call the low style. To Melvin Tumin, just after ...”