“... stretches from Hölderlin to Rilke and Celan. Unlike them, however, he is little known in Britain. Michael Hamburger’s translations established Hölderlin and Celan in English, but he was less fortunate with Trakl, and Decline, his pamphlet of 1952, was not reprinted. There was a larger selection by James Wright and Robert Bly in 1961; and Hamburger’s ...”

“... benefit their possessor if they are converted into abilities that can be exercised securely, as Jo Wolff and Avner de-Shalit underline in their book Disadvantage. They use Sen’s example of wild honey gatherers in West Bengal, who run a significant risk of being eaten by tigers. Those who gather do so from economic necessity, and the fact that they are ...”

“... books about Haig and Kitchener, VAD nurses, brave dead subalterns and monocled mutineers. I read Michael Hurd’s desolating biography – The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney – on the train to Edinburgh, the city where the nerve-wracked composer, on his way to insanity and death, was hospitalised after being gassed in 1917. I stared at the few surviving pictures of ...”

“... basis for the current cycle of the Troubles, dating from the hungry 1960s. The Harland and Wolff shipyard, once the busiest in the world, now refurbishes the odd ferry and tugboat. But Belfast and the North generally seem to have found new sustenance in handicrafts, high-tech start-ups, light manufacturing and above all tourists, both history-hunting ...”

“... back much further, than the pact at Yalta. In a well-received book, the American historian Larry Wolff charged travellers and thinkers of the Enlightenment with ‘the invention of Eastern Europe’ as a supercilious myth of the 18th century.4 The reality is that from the time of the Roman Empire onwards, the lands now covered by the new member states of the ...”