“... is a persuasive rehabilitation; none of the chapters is without memorable insights. We learn that Frank Capra, for example, is not the populist he is supposed to be: ‘His politics are . . . a kind of middle-class noblesse oblige.’ Keaton is not a rebel or a clown but a person who discovers that ‘setting up residence in the world’ is much harder than ...”

“... as of the continual experimentation involved, he moved to Berlin to work in the office of Peter Behrens, ‘a colossus of daunting stature’. He had no contact with Behrens himself, but did learn about ‘rhythm and subtle relations and many other things previously unknown to me’. That admission must have cost him dear: he was strikingly ungrateful ...”

“... her favourite work of the period – and that stretches to the writings of Elizabeth Bowen and to Peter Grimes, the opera with which Benjamin Britten returned from the States to England in 1942 – we encounter sensibilities thoroughly au fait with European modernism who nonetheless adopted the passion for the particular that is the hallmark of ...”

“... head of the works council and his girlfriend, authorised by the company’s personnel director, Peter Hartz. (In 2002, while at VW, Hartz was appointed by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to chair a commission on the labour market, which eventually led to the ‘Hartz-IV’ reforms, which cut benefits for the long-term unemployed.) But all this mattered more to ...”

“... of individuals who later had significant roles in the Nazi Party, including Rudolf Hess, Hans Frank and Alfred Rosenberg. After considering in more detail the Nazi Party’s use of demonising supernatural imagery to win over voters, the book moves in its second part to explore the Third Reich leadership’s relationship with magic and the occult and the ...”

“... who made up the ‘Hanover connection’: Sigmar Gabriel, former minister of the economy, and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, once Schröder’s chief of staff and now Germany’s president. Steinmeier has been fiercely criticised by Ukraine’s media-savvy ambassador to Berlin, Andriy Melnyk, who accuses him of cosying up to Putin just like his former boss. On ...”

“... That was not all. The confessions were backed by the most overwhelming scientific evidence. Dr Frank Skuse, a Home Office forensic scientist, had found traces of nitroglycerine on the young woman’s hands as soon as she’d been arrested. He’d also found nitroglycerine, he said, on her duffle bag, which had been rescued from one of the freight wagons ...”

“... glover. Even here in Canterbury there were other young writers growing up: John Lyly, son of Peter Lyly, clerk to the consistorial court; and Stephen Gosson, a joiner’s son. We have here a miniature blueprint for late Elizabethan theatrical tastes: Marlowe the tragedian, whose thunderous poetry packed them in at the public theatres; Lyly the author of ...”

“... necessarily, Friedman is much less sure of his ground. He places too much emphasis on the story of Frank Machon, the Glasgow haulier, who as early as 1988 spotted (and wrote to inform Prime Minister Thatcher) that end-user certificates for arms to Saudi Arabia and Jordan were being forged to disguise the arms’ real destination: Iraq. Machon is an important ...”

“... order to report to Major Thorold Dickinson (director of Gaslight in civilian life). Carol Reed and Peter Ustinov had been likewise commandeered, and the little group were told to produce a film to boost the British troops’ flagging morale. It was made, then aborted as subversive by the War Office; enough influential people had liked it, however, to ensure ...”

“... that ‘raison d’état can never be humanitarian.’ Zehrer’s prewar writing is discussed in Peter Köpf’s Schreiben nach jeder Richtung (1995) about the postwar West German press. Berghahn, however, doesn’t mention this book, and indeed seems almost completely ignorant of previous work in his field. He fails to overturn the verdict of another ...”

“... effects of policy-wonking on circulation. He became a management consultant, author and adviser to Peter Mandelson. Living on Thin Air is, for the most part, a celebration of hip and chaotic capitalism. It is written in the regulation giddy style that Thomas Frank and the Baffler school in Chicago have dissected so ...”

“... to have had his view about what was going on. Instead, we have an answer from Spinoza’s patron, Peter Serrarius, who was a leading millenarian in Amsterdam, in which Serrarius assured Oldenburg that it was true, that he knew all sorts of reliable people in the Middle East who attested to it. Oldenburg’s father-in-law, John Dury, who was actively trying to ...”

“... the appropriate Galenic text. That tradition – or much of it – has been revived in books by Frank Gonzalez-Crussi, a professor of pathology in the Children’s Memorial Hospital at Northwestern University, who has created a subgenre of his own: portrayals of the usual and the monstrous drawn from his own professional life, with a bookish veneer that ...”

“... and folksy, but the family lived in a modernist house designed by an uncle who had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright. Russell was named for his father, with whom he seems to have had a fractious but intensely close relationship; an ex-girlfriend remembers being surprised that even in his early twenties Russell still routinely referred to Charles Sr as ...”