“... who had been taken captive. Some German troops were seasoned veterans of the Eastern Front or the North Africa campaign, but others were young and inexperienced recruits. D-Day was the first time that Private Franz Rachmann had handled a machine gun outside of training: ‘I shoot, I shoot! For each American I see fall, there came ten hundred other ...”

“... of industry, the role of the unions, immigration, education, the economic and cultural gap between North and South. Several columnists (on both sides of the political divide) attributed Britain’s recent sporting success to Thatcher’s influence, and the culture of money-oriented competitive individualism that characterised her time in office. The London ...”

“... the election.*On an unannounced visit to the Korean demilitarised zone, including a few steps into North Korean territory itself with Kim Jong-un, the president brings along one of his favourite Fox News hosts, Tucker Carlson, as well as Ivanka. Carlson says of North Korea: ‘It’s a disgusting place, obviously. So ...”

“... northern excursions were conscious acts of homecoming. In the summer of that year, he took a train north but got off at Carlisle in order to make his way across the border on foot. His journey took him to bothies, youth hostels and hotel bars, where he could be found ‘singing himself drinks’ and seeking out the old songs and stories. In Glencoe an old man ...”

“... stoical insouciance of people who’d remained. The administration on the run was now headed by Paul Reynaud, a maverick conservative whose Churchillian instincts were never likely to prevail. Reynaud declared Paris an open city, but it was of no consequence for the many who’d already left and those who were scrambling out at the last minute. Hanna ...”

“... whose provenance is obscure). A large haul was made between 1911 and 1913, during an expedition in north-eastern Congo sponsored by the museum and led by an ex-military man, Armand Hutereau, to ‘enrich’ the collection.The field was highly competitive at the time. The Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin had recently wrapped up a similar expedition, while ...”

“... poetic-intellectual (and hence living) space. For the last five years, I have been living on the north coast of Brittany, which I consider at once a symbolic and strategic situation. I am in Europe, as a Euro-Scot, as a Breton-Britisher, with Britain (about to become European) just across the water. My neighbours are Tristan Corbière (in whose work Eliot ...”

“... the past twenty years a particularly virulent and specifically American component as settlers from North America have come to Israel bringing as their contribution a deeply typical combination of ideological heedlessness and indiscriminate violence. Baruch Goldstein is not a particularly unusual case: a man steeped in long-distance fantasies of a Jewish ...”

“... often very funny. There are hilarious set-pieces at the expense of, for example, John Braine and Paul Johnson. For the Sake of Argument is not an easy book to précis. There are eight parts and 72 essays, the allocation of which is somewhat random. Most of the pieces in ‘Rogues’ Gallery’, for instance, could go equally well into ‘Studies in ...”

“... We are reminded, for example, how closely modern British economic history has been linked to the North – T.S. Ashton, J.H. Clapham, M.W. Flinn and George Unwin were all, as were many others of their kind, born in the heartland of the Industrial Revolution. Did this demographic fact lead the profession to overestimate the dimensions of past ...”

“... which cut the ground under the feet of some particular mentor – a Tolstoy, a Goethe, a Paul Klee or a Hemingway – and there is ‘The Genius’, a superb debunking of literary mentors in general. But all this is double-edged. The satire on genius fits comfortably into a book with a dust-jacket proclaiming Barthelme’s genius. In another ...”

“... his father. Even plays were dangerous: the bolt from Heaven intended to spark the conversion of St Paul set fire to the actor’s trousers; the wicked son of Haman was almost hanged in the course of a performance of the story of Esther. And if you survived one hazard, it would not be long until the next one. A mason employed to dig a well for Thomas in the ...”

“... pages, showing Shell posters or School Prints, work by Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Paul Nash. As early as May 1930, another editor, Betjeman’s mentor Philip Morton Shand, part of whose enviable brief was to travel Europe in search of articles to translate and buildings to publish, but who also pursued his own parallel interests in wine and ...”

“... have recovered substantially over the last decade from the depredations of the Khmer Rouge. In the north and the south, numerous water buffalo, bullocks, pigs and ducks can be seen in the villages; workers are repairing bridges, hotels and Buddhist temples; and home-owners are putting new tiles on their roofs. Expatriates swap alarmist tales of gangsters on ...”

“... on Sartre (in 1959), and evokes Camus in Hiroshima Notes: ‘A plague that ravages a city in North Africa, for example, appears as an abnormal phenomenon; but the doctors and citizens who struggle against it rely on their normal everyday human traits.’ What Oë’s fiction takes from Existentialism is the privileging of the extreme situation, and the ...”