“... and the Paris Peace Conference, which ensured that the triumph would be squandered. What this means is that it was the dénouement of the First World War that changed everything: a messy, sprawling, disorderly event that spilled out across all attempts to contain it. Its momentous qualities cannot be made to fit into the timeframe defined by a single ...”

“... torture has been generic rather than exceptional in all branches of the military. This is by no means an exclusively American problem: stories from Deepcut barracks in England suggest that if no foreign enemy is at hand then proxies can be created. The confidential Red Cross report on Guantanamo, details of which became public at the end of November, stated ...”

“... origin, singularly lacking in semantic pedigree. It may be a variant of ‘pother’, which means a commotion of some kind, or even, according to Merriam-Webster, a ‘choking cloud of dust or smoke’. What follows over the next fifty pages or so of Into the Weeds is often little more than a pother of fleeting references to other people’s ...”

“... of leaving the ground. It encourages us to think about the moment at which, or the movement by means of which, an understanding of the world starts to take shape.Woolf’s most vivid description of the experience of leaving the ground occurs in the posthumously published ‘Sketch of the Past’, written in 1939, which evokes in absorbing detail the early ...”

“... to Palestine, where a year later he published his first story, signing it Agnon, which in Hebrew means ‘cut off’. In 1924 he adopted Agnon as his name, and, as S.Y. Agnon, came to be considered a patriarch of modern Hebrew literature. He died in 1970, four years after winning the Nobel Prize. In the wake of this success, between 1966 and 1970, Gollancz ...”

“... Leo Amery’s Birmingham, sixty years or so later, empire did not mean a great deal, to judge by David Cannadine’s memoir of his not very imperial childhood which he appends to his new book. Cannadine’s aim is to answer P.D. Morgan’s challenge to envisage the empire as ‘an entire interactive system, one vast interconnected world’. This requires a ...”

“... David Selbourne’s The Principle of Duty is described on the dust-jacket as ‘the most comprehensive theory of civic society written in English since Locke’. ‘In English’ is wise: it excludes Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Hegel, Marx and Weber. The claim remains bizarre: Locke did not produce a theory of civil society, comprehensive or otherwise, but an account of our obligations to government or the state ...”

“... mind in Whitehall because, while it is implied throughout his absorbing and well-researched book, David Leigh has refrained from going into the historical origins of Whitehall’s almost pathological obsession with secrecy. A young investigative journalist, with a healthy distaste for oligarchy in a country which boasts too much about its imagined heritage of ...”

“... big man. Once one recognises what he is up to, all the paradoxes of his character fall into place. David Willey has written a fascinating book, and has done so from the point of view of an agonised catholic liberal. ‘My faith in God is intact,’ he tells his readers by way of preface, ‘but my allegiance to the Roman Church has been suspended while I ...”

“... makes me think of Chekhov.’ The books have sold more than half a billion copies. I’d say that means Simenon achieved all his ambitions. Being a writer, he was completely miserable about that.As you’d expect, there have been many translations of Maigret into English. The project is not straightforward, as we can see just from looking at the titles. These ...”

“... came naturally to Boswell, less naturally but effectively in the sentences of Adam Smith and David Hume, but at the cost of the reservation of the Scottish tongue for casual, domestic or low-life use. Yet, as Daiches reminds us, with an exceptionally happy choice of quotations, the literary endeavours of the upper class were accompanied by a genuine ...”

“... Greek and Roman Rulers’.This in itself was not necessarily big news. The Swedish diplomat Johann David Åkerblad had already correctly deduced the signs for P and T in the hieroglyphic version of Ptolemy, suggesting that the lion stood for LO; the next, which looks like the front of a Eurostar train, for M; while in 1819 the British polymath Thomas Young ...”

“... lack of complexity is also the reason he lends himself to popularising accounts like this one. David Bather Woods writes in a deliberately non-intimidating style as he takes the reader through the various stages of Schopenhauer’s uneventful life. He was born in Danzig in 1788 and visited London as a teenager, where he made sure to drop in at the Bedlam ...”

“... Michael Schmidt’s lives of the Poets is not at all like Johnson’s. Indeed, it is by no means certain that Schmidt has taken the trouble to investigate the famous works of his precursor. He seems to think that Johnson’s poets wrote in the 18th century (some did; some didn’t) and that Johnson himself chose his subjects (only four of ...”

“... images on a wide range of writers and critics in the first three decades of the 20th century. As David Trotter notes in Cinema and Modernism,* his account of the impact of film on Woolf, Joyce and Eliot, critics have tended to associate modernist literature with montage, a term used by Russian film-makers of the 1920s to indicate a quick succession of ...”