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“... necessarily socialist, ‘we had better yield the floor to the only truly great performer in that field, Plato.’ This is not to say that Schumpeter did not himself have a conception of what socialism was, or see why socialists like him leant in one direction rather than another. Socialism was a reaction to capitalism, which ‘inevitably and by the very ...”

“... go and do the experiment, or get someone else to do it. Even if the issue wasn’t really in his field he still felt that until somebody had done the experiment it was silly to argue.’ Medawar was a brilliant, intuitive player in the game of science, as he was at bridge and chess – a person who seemed in all respects to be too lucky by half. One friend ...”

“... of Brazil in the latter part of the 16th century. This strand of thought is the main focus of Frank Lestringant’s book. Perhaps the best-known early exemplar of the tradition is Montaigne’s essay ‘On Cannibals’, first published in 1580 and largely based on ethnographic accounts of cannibal feasts by the Protestant Jean de Léry and the Catholic ...”

“... left behind no memoir when his chronically weak chest finally undid him at the age of 51. Instead, Frank Prochaska has stitched together this self-portrait out of the boxfuls of essays, letters and articles he did leave. These have been republished in multi-volume editions three times, by Forrest Morgan in 1889, by one of the Wilson sisters, Emilie ...”

“... and, according to Sharon, menavulim, a word meaning ‘malevolent criminals’. In her diary Anne Frank wrote of the German plan to ‘cleanse’ Utrecht of Jews ‘as if the Jews were cockroaches’ – a description applied to the Palestinians by the Israeli Chief of Staff General Eitan. It is easier to kill people if you think of them as animals, just as ...”

“... politics will therefore turn eagerly to the essay by our leading economic theorist, Professor Frank Hahn. What does high theory have to offer the practical politician? In his preface Professor Hahn tells us that new thinking by himself and others has led him to ‘almost inevitable’ answers which ‘bear a close family resemblance to propositions found ...”

“... happy, when she had last not been nervous. But it is not just women who are the victims in Smile: Frank, in ‘Making hay’, has just learned that he has leukaemia and can’t bring himself to tell anyone, least of all his childless, highly-strung Hungarian wife, Dorizia, who would ‘smother him in her arms and soak him with her tears’. In a ...”

“... It contains much of the background material she would use a few years later in A Stricken Field, a full-length novel set in Czechoslovakia. It is one of the finest reports in this collection, depicting a country in turmoil, with large numbers of refugees on the move like insects seething over a tree stump. Yet the scale of the disaster is relentlessly ...”

“... on, sustained by his mother’s favourite quotation (which stands as the novel’s epigraph): Anne Frank’s ‘In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.’ But, of course, Anne wrote that before the Germans got her. Thomas Keneally likes to run his fiction close to historical fact. An appended note to A Family Madness indicates ...”

“... in Kilclooney, a place so small it’s hard to find on any map. ‘Would Kilclooney mean church field?’ I ask Barry as we sit in the bar in the heel of the day. ‘It would, Tomás,’ he says, then instantly produces etymologies and all sorts of words in Irish – way beyond the dozen I vaguely know, and can never pronounce right. Barry has two languages ...”

“... manifestations of the zombie, began life as a Japanese video game; the grisliest films in the field are Italian; and there’s now a Bollywood zombie film. In all these works, the individual’s enemy is the undistinguishable mass, and indeed ever since George Romero it’s en masse that the zombies have come. The zombie has turned into the Malthusian ...”

“... before 1933 became easy and familiar, a rarity with Hitler. Röhm, Hess, Goebbels, Hans Frank and many other friends of Hitler came and went . . . He enjoyed the family and artistic atmosphere at home with the Wagners, playing the kind uncle to the Wagner children, and fancied himself a friend of the arts. Almost every sentence jars. Hamann ...”

“... different, but the unself-conscious way with which Zagajewski handles this ‘I’ brings to mind Frank O’Hara. Certainly, it wouldn’t be easy to say who is the more charming, and charm is very much the issue. The difference is that in O’Hara the ‘I’ (as in ‘I do this, I do that’) is the repository of all charm: the poems are, in Norman ...”

“... in ‘an extravagant, eye-catching green robe, bought for him, in Tunis she thought, by his Aunt Frank on his first transatlantic trip’. Elective affinity was everything. As Williams said of Pound: ‘It took just one look and I knew it was it.’ Their relationship had a note of comedy in it: ‘He was impressed with his own poetry,’ Williams ...”

“... did not draw on classical literature. Women could be ‘lovers of their own sex’ or, in the more frank Greek loan word, ‘tribades’ (literally ‘rubbers’; the words ‘rubster’ and ‘fricatrice’ were also used in the 17th century). The OED cites no usage of ‘lesbianism’ in the modern sense before 1870, when it was used to argue that ...”