“... a small town built on a sandbank in middle Germany. The first historian of what came to be known as the Reformation, Johann Sleidan, thought it remarkable that the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, could lay claim to be another Charles the Great because of what this insignificant man had done in a hole in a corner of ...”

“... up in wine-coloured trousers plus checked shirt and bow tie, this gangling provincial seemed to be projecting himself as some kind of dandy aesthete: ‘a little ridiculous in appearance, anyway outlandish, unlikely, on one’s hasty summing up, to be attractive to girls’. Amis would soon enough experience a change of ...”

“... Thames and the Humber – made it possible for each of the more mountainous parts of the island to be isolated by invaders and guarded by them. When they lost the towns and forts commanding these estuaries, the resident Celts were pushed back into their mountain fastnesses. The inhabitants ...”

“... apart from his First World War paintings and prints. They are easy to like: influenced by Cubism but totally comprehensible – a sort of Modernism-lite. I went to the Nevinson retrospective at the Imperial War Museum hoping for that rare thing: a father-son heroic double-header. The wartime oils and prints were as powerful as I had remembered ...”

“... again, putting Jean Harlow on the couch below an elongated, brooding Freud; she appears to be dreaming of cacti, shown outside the window lighting up the night sky. Covarrubias is illustrating one of the ‘Impossible Interviews’ that ran in the Vanity Fair of the Thirties. There he is yet again, crowding together in aggressively two-dimensional ...”

“... The Second World War is no longer what it used to be. The populists of the New Right, aided and abetted by amateur historians of the mole-hunting variety, have been distorting it into a morality tale of the Cold War. Scholars may talk as they please, constructing complex patterns of interpretation for a minority audience: the popular ground has been won by the Chapman Pincher school of history, with its attendant band of novelists, journalists and politicians ...”

“... their ordinary life becomes illumined with the significance of destiny, as the ‘great man’-to-be fuses momentarily with the child. These moments, for Sartre, bestow a vertiginous god-like sensation upon the reader, who is thereby placed in a position to exchange knowing looks and indulgent smiles with the author over the heads of the characters. Patricia ...”

“... deep chord among those in England who felt, as she did, that their youth had been ‘smashed up’ by the Great War. Nearly a million men of their generation lay buried in Flanders and Gallipoli; many of those who remained felt condemned to hollow lives, haunted by loss and grief. They believed that those sacrificed had been ...”

“... Carmi’s prose combines accuracy and grace to such a degree that readers without Hebrew will be able to enjoy the book almost as much as readers who have it, while those, like myself, who are in the process of learning the language or have only vague memories of it from the dim childhood past will find many hours of pleasure awaiting them as they ...”

“... against the nuclear arms race has also received considerable inspiration from a series of articles by Jonathan Schell which appeared this past February in the New Yorker. These articles have now been reprinted in book form, and are continuing to have a profound impact on people’s thinking about the nuclear threat. The book is divided into three sections. The ...”

“... study, though it offers simply to tell ‘a story about a story’. The Roman Lucretia was raped by Tarquin, the king’s son, or rather blackmailed into submission by Tarquin’s threat of killing her and his slave and leaving them in bed together. The following morning she called in her father and husband, told them what ...”

“... with a strong autobiographical urge. But she baulked at ‘all those pages, x-hundreds, it could be x-thousands, peppered with I’s’. As a compromise, we have this kebab: fatty scraps of self-revelation alternating with more substantial portions of fiction. Personal privacy is clearly a valued property of Barker’s and one which sometimes seems at odds ...”

“... Mr Kennaway. When he watches me I can see that he doesn’t think I am pretty. Oh God, let me be pretty when I grow up. Jean Rhys was 12 at the time of the wedding in Castries, on the island of St Lucia. At the age of six a photograph had been taken of her: she looked very pretty then in a new white dress. Three years later, she realised ‘with dismay ...”

“... world over. In it, Debray developed the doctrine of the foco, the small guerrilla band that was to be the nucleus of Marxist revolution throughout Latin America. Repudiating the ‘reformist’ policies of the continent’s Communist Parties, this self-proclaimed Leninist rejected, not only the urban proletariat, but also the peasantry, as the motive force of ...”

“... of disorganised and confusing events, lacking clear definition and structure. They seem to be a kind of sudden rupture which is only uncertainly related to its immediate environment – life in Brixton or Southall or Toxteth. No longer quite predictable and intelligible in the manner of ordinary, uneventful social affairs, riots invite being described ...”