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“... thousand missing originated in East Germany itself, and it corresponds pretty well with Martin Middlebrook’s cautious estimate, in The Bomber Command War Diaries, that deaths ‘may have exceeded 50,000’. Any visitor to the present-day DDR can see that the still-occupying Soviets continue to impress upon its citizens that Germany suffered just ...”

“... was apparently not a matter of high spiritual drama: his instructor, the celebrity Jesuit Martin D’Arcy, was struck by how very ‘matter of fact’ Waugh’s approach was. For someone who missed ‘the restraint of a traditional culture’, the unmitigated authority of the universal Church naturally had a salutary appeal. Part of Waugh’s religion ...”

“... and log every instance, all the way from D.H. Lawrence and Anna Wickham through John Betjeman to Martin Amis, of one single placename’s use to connote a vast tundra of anodyne, apathetic anonymity. Here, though, Croydon is exactly where you’d expect Lodge to make his couple come from: a prompt for often disappointingly chummy humour at the expense of ...”

“... from within, from a recognition and rejection of human alikeness between watcher and villain. Martin Scorsese’s brutal, dazzling film about everyday life in the lower ranks of the Mafia, GoodFellas, plays with this gothic scheme of the watcher drawn into the criminal underworld, but with an irony that partly accounts for the work’s shocking impact. We ...”

“... the city. Thousands died. But there was no surrender, and the city was finally relieved by the new king, William of Orange. Every year, the Orange Order, the Apprentice Boys and others celebrate the victory by burning an effigy of Lundy to shouts of ‘no surrender!’ Pinned to its chest is a sign that says: ‘Lundy the Traitor’. When Foster realised she ...”

“... the Catholic faith. All seats were sold countrywide. The Cautionary Tales – which tell of Henry King, ‘Who chewed bits of String and was early cut off in Dreadful Agonies’, and Rebecca, ‘Who slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably’ – are in iambic octosyllabic couplets and can run to fifty lines or so. How did Clara Butt contrive to sing ...”

“... the tidiness and neatness of argument that we normally admire in a work of scholarship. Like Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust, it takes the form of a list: there is one set of names and places after another, with no subordination to a grand theme or decisive conclusion. We don’t even know for sure the number of those who left Germany after 1933, let ...”

“... medieval England, he switched tracks in the 1970s to work on the pioneering Bavaria Project led by Martin Broszat, which examined the attitudes of ordinary Germans during the Third Reich. His 1983 book on popular opinion and political dissent in Bavaria reflected this interest. Four year later came ‘The Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich, a ...”

“... that by now his publicity people would have come up with something a little more attractive.Martin Amis, MoneyWell, they keep trying. Look here upon this picture, and on this. Both are unsigned 17th-century portraits, one depicting a man, the other a child. The man is an affable-looking chap, reminiscent of Phil Hopkins, a percussionist at the repro ...”

“... the bar to his appeal. The 1960s were everywhere at this Convention, in references to Vietnam and Martin Luther King, but also in notions of protest and togetherness. A priest stood up in the Cathedral Church of St Paul’s in Tremont Street. ‘Don’t let people rob us of a legacy,’ he said. ‘That religion and ...”

“... about colonial privilege and domination to other groups, notably black Americans. In an essay on Martin Luther King, James Baldwin and Malcolm X, he argued that black Americans confronted not merely exploitation and disenfranchisement, but coercive pressure to ‘simulate the white to the point of becoming him, in order to ...”

“... British authorities to the New York Times called a terrorist campaign. In 1946 they blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people, British, Arab and Jewish, and in 1948 they massacred the villagers of Deir Yassin. In between those two events, in 1947, the Irgun captured two British sergeants, Clifford ...”

“... of the play and then to finish on a spectacular death: roles like Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and, above all, Macbeth. Given his long-nourished Anglophobia and the seemingly inevitable collision with Macready which remains the most celebrated event of his career, it may seem odd that Forrest was prepared to stake so much of his reputation on the ...”

“... black mamba’. Nabokov responded by putting Hingley into the translation (heavily revised) of King, Queen, Knave as a department store mannequin – a literal blockhead. The odd thing is that, in addition to a critical study, Hingley was reviewing Speak, Memory, book which, like Pnin, displays Nabokov’s humanity at its most engaging. His private manner ...”

“... man ‘who began his memoir with the sentence: “In a land of moral imbeciles, I knew I could be king.”’ All the same, the final stretch of Lee’s life was quite sad, and in Riesman’s telling it becomes a kind of goofy parable about the dangers of attaching a single face to collaborative endeavours. There’s a theory that the modern notion of ...”