“... seems to have preferred the expression ‘the Jewish Catastrophe’. At this stage ‘holocaust’ may have been more commonly attached to the prospect of nuclear war. The shift undoubtedly came in 1963 with the controversy surrounding Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which set in motion an intense public interrogation of Jewish conduct during the Nazi ...”

“... turned down von Ranke’s own vacated chair in Berlin. The fans of the lectures on Greek culture may have been dilettantes, but they were dilettantes of the highest order, including both Nietzsche and Freud. Indeed, Nietzsche’s flatteries became so extravagant – ‘that profoundest student of Greek culture now living’, ‘our great teacher’, ‘I ...”

“... by Tamara de Lempicka from 1933 – and Yvonne George, a Belgian cabaret star who swept the poet Robert Desnos off his feet. Members of the Brigade des moeurs were biddable, and liked to get a slice of the action, whatever it happened to be. They didn’t have much in the way of convictions, in any sense, especially when it came to pornography and drugs. The ...”

“... the whole thing in a proper chronological order, not like this mish-mash I’m making you.’ He may only be a literary construct, but his instincts are sound. Postmodernism as Chabon practises it is a laminate of uncertainty and overconfidence, a formula for taking risks that is actually pretty safe. Think the jumbled chronology works? Great. Think it ...”

“... of all the ministers of death’, and its preferred targets were children. In the past, you may have had something like a one in three chance of getting the disease and, if you did get it, a one in five chance of dying, though some outbreaks killed 50 per cent of the afflicted. Now smallpox is no more. In 1980, the World Health Organisation declared it ...”

“... peace’. When set beside ‘anti-courtly’ Spenserian verse, ‘To Penshurst’ and ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ ‘give the sense of a nation which, whatever its faults, is essentially harmonious and well-ordered and reflects credit on its governors’. Even so, there are dangers in calling Jonson a ‘court poet’ and a ‘conservative’: more of them ...”

“... but not seen. It would have been much improved by a stronger sense of context, for while Brown may be largely lost to us as a knowable individual he is not entirely so. The few papers tell us something, and the circumstances of his life and work might be pieced together convincingly enough to describe in outline the qualities of the man who was able to ...”

“... by the Irgun in the newspaper version of Land of Black Gold when the Germans invaded Belgium in May 1940. Hergé drove to France with his wife, sister-in-law, niece and Siamese cat, which according to Peeters he sometimes took for walks on a lead. Leopold III surrendered on 27 May; placed under house arrest in his palace ...”

“... Soviet Union was as much founded in the work of the 19th-century poetic realists Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson as in that of the 19th-century prosaic fantasists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ – but he would have been hard put to point to the aspects of fantasy in the works of ‘Marx, that old shaman’, the overwhelming majority of which were ...”

“... but certain, in Godfrey-Smith’s view, that octopuses have rich subjective experience. But they may have even more than this. According to some theorists, notably Stanislas Dehaene, a particular kind of mental processing, the sort that involves completing novel tasks extended over time, not only goes hand in hand with human consciousness, but helps explain ...”

“... interest is often key to the appearance of a writer’s work in another language; it may make their fortune: Anthea Bell (Englishing Sebald) and Ann Goldstein (voicing Elena Ferrante) propelled the authors to cult status beyond their own shores. Like a shrub moved to a sunnier position, writers may thrive when ...”

“... said: ‘No, I haven’t.’ When the audience began to laugh, Armstrong beamed back at them. He may have appeared remote, but that scene, which appears in Moon Launch Live, shows how easily he could establish a rapport. ‘Silence is a Neil Armstrong answer,’ his wife, Janet, once said. ‘The word “no” is an argument.’ Also: ‘I’m not married to ...”

“... more than mere philosophical speculation in mind. The Enquiry was discussed by Pitt’s cabinet in May, but although the book might have been expected to encounter the full force of the law – as Paine’s similarly argued Rights of Man (1791) had done two years earlier – Godwin wasn’t prosecuted. ‘A three-guinea book could never do much harm among ...”

“... signal the intimation of half-thoughts, shadowy promptings of a kind that only a first-rate writer may catch in words. There is a scene early in The Shopworn Angel where he sits in a taxi beside Margaret Sullavan, a soldier accepting a lift from a posh woman, speaking softly partly because he is shy of her beauty but also because he feels in the wrong: she is ...”

“... than U-235), it is very unlikely that it could have made it small enough for missile delivery. It may be able to deliver a weapon from a plane, but given the air superiority of the US this is not a significant threat. Far more real is the DPRK’s ability to threaten a conventional artillery attack on Seoul, where more than ten million people live. This kind ...”