“... Two other works throw light on this, and Littell seems to have studied both of them. One is Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 (1992), which revealed that the men of a police unit that systematically shot the Jewish inhabitants of one village after another were not Nazi fanatics or passionate anti-semites. They were ...”

“... inch a mandarin’ – and the political scientist Colin Leys. Qualified praise goes to Christopher Hill; there are fond memories of Tariq Ali (who contests one or two details in the memoir). Johnson remembers Hodgkin, a dogged adversary of Pretoria, refusing to sign a petition in favour of anti-apartheid activists who’d torn up the cricket ground ...”

“... to be sectioned. They told her to come back on Monday. Readers secure in their hearing can hope to sharpen their intuition when confronted with odd-seeming bits of behaviour – perverse restaurant choice, for instance. ‘What about Mash?’ they’d say. I’d remember the scrape of crockery and the roar like an aircraft hangar. ‘Sort of,’ I’d ...”

“... his lap. Although de Pury modestly concedes that it would be an exaggeration to compare him to Christopher Columbus, he does want us to believe that he is a great explorer. He claims to have spotted Richter when he was still an ‘emerging’ artist. He hasn’t the slightest doubt that ‘contemporary art’ is ‘the New Old Masters’. When, in ...”

“... it and let me know – there’s no hurry. I know you’ll make a marvellous literary executor. I hope you don’t mind my asking – if you find the idea too much of a bore, just say so – but I think you’ll have quite an interesting time going through all my letters and so on and deciding what ought to be done with them. And by the way, if you do feel ...”

“... but the ambitious ‘socialist government’ of 1945? Brideshead was televised in 1981, but Christopher Booker’s devastating documentary ‘City of Towers’ had already gone out in 1978. The decades which have brought new security and cultural status to the country house have also seen the collapse of its initially overwhelming opposition. A ...”

“... period of putting its own house in order, is now widely recognised in the Party, and one can only hope that Roy Jenkins continues to give it his highest priority. For he was elected leader, I believe, not because he is the darling of the Party, but, above all, because his judgment commands the respect even of those who regard him as insufficiently radical. It ...”

“... victim of a ‘lofty malady’ – the title of one of Pasternak’s longer poems. ‘There is no hope,’ proclaims a lyric of Mandelstam, for a heart ever burning With nightingale fever. Dr Hingley takes the phrase to characterise his study of the four greatest poets of Russia’s post-Revolutionary age. All four say, in this context, the same ...”

“... of the mother goddess to whom the Tollund Man and his luckless counterparts were offered up in the hope that their deaths might persuade her to restore fertility to the land in the spring. ‘They were sacrificed and placed in the sacred bogs,’ Glob puts it, rather brightly, ‘consecrated for all time to Nerthus, goddess of fertility – to Mother ...”

“... always, the over-fertility of Empson’s mind, and the frantic pseudo-discipline he applied in the hope of controlling that fertility. Complex words are complex because of the range of social attitudes they can imply, and because of the range of senses they have, and because of their distinctive histories, and because of the particular circumstances in which ...”

“... and on 30 January he tweeted a denunciation of his intelligence chiefs Dan Coats, Gina Haspel and Christopher Wray: they were ‘naive’ for telling the Senate that Iran wasn’t working on a nuclear weapon. Half of Trump’s argument for exiting the agreement Obama signed with Iran in 2015, along with the UK, France, China, Russia and Germany, was that the ...”

“... and outlives the majority of human passions: Dante’s is one of those which one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life. This is a fine tribute not only to the verse that caused the hit that causes the shudder, but to the wholeness that is required for its accommodation. I suppose that in the nature of the case, when the poets concerned are ...”

“... led him in the eyes of many to betray his left-wing views altogether. Such, no doubt, is how Christopher Hitchens will be remembered. The resemblances to George Orwell, on whom Hitchens has written so admiringly,* are obvious enough, though so are some key differences. Orwell was a kind of literary proletarian who lived in dire straits for most of his ...”

“... it’s better to press on; and that one mustn’t fall into the arms of religion after the rout of hope. Steinmetz, ingeniously, also hears it as a call to the ends of the earth. ‘The truly modern man,’ he remarks elsewhere, ‘is the merchant, the engineer, full of youthful energy, who heads for parts of the world where gold and silver are plentiful, and ...”

“... blunders of the German elite’ can’t be made to shoulder all the blame. In The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark deploys on a grander scale and over a much longer timeframe essentially the same argument.* ‘The protagonists of 1914,’ he writes at the end, ‘were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the ...”