“... Jewish intellectual community associated with Partisan Review, Dissent and Commentary was appalled by her notion of the ‘banality of evil’ . The very phrase (many readers got no further) seemed to trivialise the Holocaust, to make its fundamental crimes literally superficial. Meanwhile a new breed of artists was advancing another brand of banality, with ...”

“... at Gatsby’s parties; no collective urge to write the great war novel; no second sex. To judge by the best of the new writing, the most urgent of the new films, the most-watched television, American lives are now devoted to a wholesale inhabitating of the dead afternoon. It is not the world of beginnings nor the world of ends that obsesses: it is what ...”

“... The Black Scarab. In December 1929, Jacob Morrow won fourth prize in a short-story competition run by the Hampshire Telegraph. Soon afterwards, she began to sign her work O.M. Manning, but it was as Olivia Manning that in 1937 she published The Wind Changes with Jonathan Cape. In being acquired by Cape, Manning made an ...”

“... he went to the United Nations, made official visits to West Germany and Israel, was received by the Queen, and was still getting rounds of applause from African crowds as late as September 1978 (at Kenyatta’s funeral) and from African heads of state, in the summer of the same year, at the Organisation of African Unity summit in Khartoum. To Britain’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 1939, the Conservatives had been in power for a couple of decades, interrupted only briefly by the first two Labour governments. They had been in coalition for much of that time, but had always been the dominant party, and the government formed when the second Labour administration collapsed in the wake of the 1931 financial crisis was ‘national’ in ...”

“... greenhouse gas emissions drastically in the next few decades. Coal, gas and oil will have to be replaced with clean energy sources. In the language of climate policy, this is known as the green energy transition and is often presented as the latest in a series of transitions that have shaped modern history. The first was from organic energy ...”

“... property: wealthy arrivistes were lapping up the baronetcies and knighthoods awarded in profusion by cynical Tory politicians. The ambitious late Victorian man could aspire to a satisfying variety of professions and an expanded range of dining clubs. And within five years, the Order of Merit and the British Academy would ...”

“... hidden in the tripod and recording their expressions at the moment of death. Mark himself was used by his camera-obsessed father, who particularly enjoyed capturing ‘the reactions of the nervous system to fear’. In a home movie of Mark as a child, Powell appears as the tyrant father and his son as Mark. Powell implicates himself – and us – in the fear ...”

“... In June​ 1391, an anti-Jewish riot broke out in Seville, prompted by the incendiary preaching of a local priest. Four thousand Jews were murdered, and the violence soon spread to more than ninety Iberian cities. The events of 1391 remain the largest massacre of Jews in Iberian history. Over the following two decades, more than half the Jews of Aragon and Castile converted to Christianity, though these conversions were hardly freely chosen ...”

“... the last twenty years. Labour was well ahead of the Conservatives in the polls. The Tory leader, David Cameron, was in a difficult phase, no longer a fresh figure after a year and a half in charge, and facing growing internal opposition to his liberalisation strategy. Brown, long regarded at Westminster and by the media as ...”

“... and I was tucked into bed upstairs with the lights off. I was watching Season Six of the X-Files. By this point, the show had moved to LA. The sun was almost pink, going down behind Mulder’s ear. Two men together in a car being swept by searchlights. This was the episode in which Bryan Cranston plays a man tormented ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... whose view that the war was the product of a misguided foreign policy, but could scarcely be brought to a stop overnight, was not always well understood by out-and-out pacifists or out-and-out opponents of capitalism). The war brought Labour to the forefront of national politics, but the first post-war election ...”