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“... Paul Ferdonnet and André Olbrecht, who recorded programmes in Stuttgart; in the States, ‘Tokyo Rose’, Mildred Gillars (‘Axis Sally’) and Ezra Pound, who was indicted for broadcasting from Italy; in Britain, John Amery and P.G. Wodehouse, who was cold-shouldered for giving a jaunty talk about life in his internment camp. Lord Haw-Haw was the most ...”

“... Sixties, however, the Holocaust barely figured in the life of America, or of America’s Jews. As Peter Novick remarks, between the end of World War Two and the late Sixties, only a handful of books and films touched on the subject. Jewish intellectuals paid it little attention. No monuments or tributes marked the event. On the contrary, major Jewish ...”

“... to be more Republican or more dispassionately liberal. But he is wary of the charge (reiterated by Peter Porter in his sharp Sunday Telegraph review of Opened Ground) of ‘fetishising ... the local’, and cautious about the indigenous traditions of Irish nationalism, given the evidence that ‘pride in the ethnic and religious heritage can quickly degrade ...”

“... 1960s, even in traditional rice economies such as China and Japan. The supply of wheat in China rose from fewer than 200 calories per person a day in 1961 to nearly 600 in 2009. Across Asia, the gradual substitution of wheat for rice has been a near universal marker of economic development.The human relationship with wheat is the subject of Catherine ...”

“... seine fishermen of Long Island whose way of life was being extinguished in the mid-1980s, just as Peter Matthiessen was at work on his account of it? ‘These doggedly independent men,’ he tells us, ‘do not speak of themselves as “working”, far less “taking a job”.’ He quotes one of the younger generation: ‘Fishin wasn’t a job, it was your ...”

“... pretty quickly – as Suite at the Majestic. That same translation became The Strange Case of Peter the Lett, then The Case of Peter the Lett. In 1963 it was newly translated as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. David Bellos’s recent translation is the first with the confidence to call the book in English what it is ...”

“... in a thoughtful, nibbling way, and when she paused to carry the cigarette to her mouth, her chin rose in preparation, as though someone else’s hand were feeding it to her. She looked vulnerable and girlish sitting there. She had large, flat thumbnails. I stared at her; no Eskimo icon could be more imposing. She blew smoke into the air and looked back at ...”

“... historical frame, above all the Catholic triumphalism manifested in Bernini’s colonnades for St Peter’s piazza or in the impeccably prim altarpieces of Carlo Maratta, the president of the Accademia di San Luca. And so little moved forward in the fractured Italy of those days. Rich families vied for the papacy; loyalties inclined to this or that ...”

“... of gannets’ skins, and were said to look like “feathered Mercuries”.’ Sometimes brogues rose above the knee, like fisherman’s waders: clearly their rusticity defined them, not their shape. These serviceable homemade brogues could translate a labourer into a nymph, a shepherd into a dweller in Arcadia; they were brimming over with the spirit of ...”

“... seems to have any interests – not literature or art or politics or themselves. They are, as Rose Macaulay astutely noted, ‘amiable nitwits’, and some of them aren’t that amiable. You can see the force in Bradbury’s remark that Waugh’s novels of this period are in a way ‘anti-novels’, their mode defined by a deliberate refusal to undertake ...”

“... in particular discomforts her. In it Witold writes of having found peace through ‘the perfect rose between the legs of a certain woman’. The invisible worm has found out her bed of crimson joy. She dislikes the image: it is at once too flowery, too perfumed and too coarse. Naming the rose and locating it with such ...”

“... man: ‘Poor Ted.’ Over the years the name changed, ‘Poor Roger’ (my first husband), ‘Poor Peter’ (her son), ‘Poor Martin’ (or any other man who she thought had been treated badly by a woman). But as far as I was concerned the death of Sylvia was before my time, if only by weeks, in the same way that the end of the Second World War was before my ...”

“... new Escalier Daru in the Louvre surmounting a reconstruction of the prow on which it originally rose above the rocks of Samothrace. This event provoked a rage for colossal windswept personifications on the skylines of buildings, which reached a climax in the quadrigas by George Récepon which burst with exhilarating absurdity from the roof of the Grand ...”

“... Russell on the evolution of Pym’s character and Morrill on Pym’s relations with backwoods MPs; Peter Thomas on Court and country cultures) is intelligently deployed, but not always searchingly tested against the events Mr Fletcher describes. And Mr Fletcher is careful to warn us that ‘although this book contains a new narrative it is in no sense an ...”

“... in Europe: they have been virtually eliminated, according to Mitford, in the United States. Peter Chamberlen, a Huguenot barber-surgeon whose family settled in London, invented the forceps in 1588. The family kept it a secret for over a hundred years, travelling about to attend the births of those wealthy enough to pay for their ministrations. Not only ...”