“... A sacrifice wholly consumed by fire; a whole burnt offering ... A complete sacrifice or offering ... A sacrifice on a large scale ... Complete consumption by fire, or that which is so consumed; complete destruction, esp. of a large number of persons; a great slaughter or massacre’: such is the OED’s definition of the word ‘holocaust ...”

“... lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island.Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s DictionaryStalemate beneath the dense sky of moratorium agreements: the best we can hope for Europe ... But there is no escape route in ...”

“... economy of evangelical Christianity. Life was centrally planned: all negotiations had to pass by Jesus’s desk. Language was religiously inflated. When my bedroom was untidy my parents told me that this was ‘poor stewardship’, because it was not right to be careless with God’s things. Poor behaviour was ...”

“... lines of your unyielding story another narrative may awaken and begin to stand up. And that will be the story you take home: the unending story of the story itself. You’d do well to snap your pencil and walk away at that point. Exhaustion can be a wise counsellor. But sometimes the second story not only stands up but ...”

“... For a time, early last year, there was no trace of Robespierre to be found on the street where he lived in the days of his fame. The restaurant called Le Robespierre had closed its doors, and after a while its portrait sign was removed from above the entrance of the house on the rue Saint-Honoré. Once again, the plaque on the wall had been smashed ...”

“... cost you, he said, but if she can get AZT and 3TC in the first 12 hours you can cut the Aids risk by 80 per cent. Brian has twice had to apply such emergency treatment to nurses working in his unit after they pricked themselves with needles used to draw blood from the HIV positive prostitutes who are the central figures in his unit’s attempt to control the ...”

“... The invitation​ said ‘black dress for Ladies’. ‘You’re not allowed to be whiter than him,’ my husband, Jason, instructs. ‘He has to be the whitest. And you cannot wear a hat because that is his thing.’We are discussing the pope, who has woken one morning, at the age of 86, with a sudden craving to meet artists ...”

“... money from A to B. There are times when money in place A, a saver’s bank account, say, would be usefully deployed in place B, a business needing cash to expand, or an individual wanting a mortgage to be able to buy somewhere to live. It’s easy to extrapolate from this that finance is mainly about supplying money to ...”

“... the strike end with its unconditional surrender? And why did unconditional surrender turn out to be only a temporary reverse for the labour movement? Monumental mobilisation and crushing defeat produced perplexingly medium-sized consequences.The hundredth anniversary has produced a crop of new accounts. Activists from different points on the ...”

“... and internally divided natures at war with themselves as much as with each other and constrained by circumstances largely of their own making. After her death Ritchie destroyed his letters to Bowen and some of hers to him. We are left, therefore, with her remaining letters and his diaries: she talks to him and he talks to himself. Like two soliloquists just ...”

“... anything but confident about the language they lay out so lavishly. On the contrary, they seem to be caught between a desperate hope that one more word will do the trick, catch the reality or name the mystery, and the reluctant belief that nothing at all is going to work. Sometimes we see them trapped between these stances, as when Marlow harangues his ...”

“... was a chum. Every boy had a torch and at night I shone mine from the bedroom window, refusing to be upstaged by the big torch in the sky. I remember asking my mother if the Moon could come on holiday with us, and she laughed, exactly the same laugh as my father gave out when I said I wanted to ...”

“... placid obliviousness to her frightening circumstances was the way to signal that she might safely be released. To have shown distress, much less anger, would have been crazy. The infection in her brain was diagnosed on the morning of her discharge, the masquerade having been a success, when one of the doctors nevertheless thought to order a spinal tap. Why ...”

“... researching his subject’s ‘savage pilgrimage’ but actually getting on with what turns out to be the book’s real business, which is to obsess at length about what he himself, writer, flâneur, free-floating stoner, is supposedly doing with his life. He envies them sometimes, ‘those with jobs’, because unlike him they have a structure to fit into, a ...”

“... narrates the slow and difficult recognition of a condition that had been concealed since antiquity by male doctors’ theories about the ‘uterine’ irrationality of women. Micale could scarcely have found a better image to introduce his ‘hidden history’ than the scene from Huston’s film. He seems, however, not to know that Huston had during the Second ...”