“... essential for a more radical understanding of Dasein’. The special place granted to German may also have been connected to the capacity of German to generate unusual nouns, very often compound ones: most of Heidegger’s contributions, as either neologisms or adaptations of existing terms to new ends, make an appearance in the dictionary (for ...”

“... saw Igbo officers hunted down and murdered. Then the murders became massacres. ‘Massacre’ may seem melodramatic. But perhaps because the events leading to the Nigeria-Biafra war are so often eclipsed by the war itself, so little remembered, it seems an apt word for the thousands of Igbo civilians in the North who were killed between ...”

“... his own creator, rather as religious believers are supposed to do when they die. The same may be true of the hero of Dublinesque, who spots a man who may be Vila-Matas. Like many modernist texts, Ulysses ransacks mythology to provide a fractured modern world with some underlying order. The book, its author and one ...”

“... flow of aid from the US and elsewhere. He wants US troops to stay at any cost, and fears Karzai may upset Washington by demanding an end to US troops’ immunity from local prosecution after 2014 – this is what scuppered US plans to keep troops in Iraq. If all the US troops do leave, Atmar’s main fear is not that the Taliban will capture Kabul, but that ...”

“... who believed that all illness, physical or mental, was the work of the Devil, a conviction that may have been shared by Jesus. It is notable that he never once urges the sick to reconcile themselves to their infirmities. On the contrary, he seems to regard their illness as the fruit of evil, and his healing them as part of his mission against the powers of ...”

“... to do in certain circumstances, since if they are bound to do it they are not free. Capitalism may be teetering on the verge of ruin, but it may not be socialism that replaces it. It may be fascism, or barbarism. Hobsbawm reminds us of a small but significant phrase in The Communist ...”

“... by King Frederick William IV of Prussia, which Andrea Wulf quotes in her fine new biography, may be a slight exaggeration, but it reflects Humboldt’s extraordinary reputation among his contemporaries. On the centennial of his birth, 14 September 1869, elaborate celebrations were held all over the world; the front page of the New York Times was devoted ...”

“... maps (all rectangles and broad arrows), and in a wealth of jargon which non-enthusiasts (like me) may struggle with. (I was inoculated against all things military by compulsory service in my school’s ludicrous CCF.) It all reads persuasively, however, even to a non-enthusiast; partly because – as is becoming customary (see the books on Britain’s later ...”

“... humanity is famished, depleted, emptied out of any rich bourgeois inwardness; and though there may be an Irish memory of famine here for Beckett, Adorno could find in this image the poor forked creatures of Auschwitz. The Jew and the Irishman could find common ground in this stark extremity, as they find common ground in Ulysses and in many popular ...”

“... but for the vast majority who remained in work, purchasing power expanded. And while free trade may have hit heavy industry hard, it kept food prices low. Even the advent of imperial protection in 1932 merely shifted the direction of imports, so that by the late 1930s two-thirds of imported food came from the empire – wheat from Canada, lamb from New ...”

“... an underground, chimerical story of Valentino’s queerness. As a contrarian category, queerness may be passé, and yet, reading Dark Lover, I feel nostalgia for the notion that gorgeous, sexually ambiguous movie stars provide grist for the gay mill. ‘Outing’, however morally dubious, thrills a reader who twists received stories for the pleasure of ...”

“... thought of without a consideration of madness (and vice versa) is not to say, as Phillips fears it may be, that sanity is merely evacuated lunacy, the blank space left when the demons are gone. It is only to see how intimately the words are related to each other. He is right, of course, to suggest, as he does in Monogamy, that ‘we need to find a way of ...”

“... of view it proves his duplicity. The actor who pretends to be Hamlet is not really Hamlet but may be as much Hamlet as anyone is ever going to be; the person who pretends to an illness – a so-called mental illness – may not really be ill, but can be as ill as anyone can be. At the very least, pretending to be ...”

“... on the retreat but able to stage daily suicide bomb attacks, ambushes and assassinations. On 4 May a man with explosives attached to his body blew himself up in a queue of young men trying to join the police in Arbil, killing 60 of them and wounding 150. Ghassan Attiyah, a political commentator in Baghdad, told me that ‘the Kurds were able to destabilise ...”

“... Chekhov may be divine, but he is responsible for much sinning on earth. The contemporary short story is essentially sub-Chekhovian. It is most obviously indebted to what Shklovsky called Chekhov’s ‘negative endings’: the way his stories expire into ellipses, or seem to end in the middle of a thought – ‘It was starting to rain ...”