“... massacred there. We scraped off some wads of chewing gum that visitors had stuck on the Star of David (bored Lithuanian schoolchildren, I imagine, engaged in zero-degree desecration), and we said Kaddish for the dead. Before we headed back to town, we stepped into the tiny, one-room excuse for a museum that has been built to commemorate the horrors. There ...”

“... by many readers, but it was nonetheless Milton’s founding intention in composing his epic. As David Norbrook shows in his seminal study Writing the English Republic, the language of chaos and creation briefly took on optimistic overtones during the Commonwealth, but with its disintegration the images became despairing. The Grand Concernments of England ...”

“... Cholmeley, but in each case orchestrated by Thomas Drury. A letter discovered a few years ago by David Riggs further highlights Drury’s involvement, because it shows he had a prior connection with Lord Keeper Puckering. On 8 November 1592 Lord Buckhurst wrote to Puckering: I did speak to Mr Drury according to your Lordship’s desire, and after a long ...”

“... In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare’. Though there have been other biographies since Martin’s, Bate’s should finally disprove Dickens’s dismissal of it as a ‘preposterous exaggeration of small claims’, and consolidate Clare’s reputation as a major Romantic poet (it’s strange to remember that he was much more successful in his lifetime than Keats, with whom he shared a publisher ...”

“... and zakat simply cannot go to Palestinians without donors risking a federal investigation. As David Feige explained in Slate after the mistrial, the HLF was accused of ‘aiding a terrorist organisation by helping it spread its ideology and recruit members. Translation: even those who support good works are guilty of terrorism if the good works make the ...”

“... development conjured from the Bryant & May match factory, the weaver’s garret occupied by David Rodinsky above a decommissioned synagogue in Princelet Street, and the first speculative (and doomed) ‘Montmartre meets Montserrat’ restaurant on Dalston Lane. Wright managed to get an entire book out of a few hundred yards of old degraded Hackney ...”

“... a groan when we get to the postmortem phase with a paragraph that begins: ‘The classicist David Grene, Bellow’s colleague at the Committee on Social Thought (an interdisciplinary PhD programme at the University of Chicago, also a sort of high-powered academic salon des refusés), drew an intriguing parallel between Greek comedy and The Last ...”

“... siblings of Paul Gosar, Republican congressman from Arizona, endorse his Democratic opponent, Dr David Brill. In response, Gosar tweets: ‘Like leftists everywhere, they put political ideology before family. Stalin would be proud.’ (Gosar, a former dentist, is notable for his belief that neo-Nazi groups are funded by George Soros, a Jewish Holocaust ...”

“... rather than his more obviously offensive remarks about Hitler). As the socialist lawyer and writer David Renton points out, the Equalities Act sets a bar here: judges must consider not only the feeling of offence but whether that feeling is objectively reasonable.Corbyn’s comment was not a denial that antisemitism exists within the party, but a claim that ...”

“... island – the freest and fairest in Singaporean history – which made the Labour Front leader, David Marshall, head of the local advisory board of what remained a British colony. The son of Sephardic Baghdadis, Marshall had been a Japanese POW in the mines of Hokkaido, and had Fabian connections in London. He proposed the creation of a welfare state and ...”

“... offered a positive defence of capitalism, calling for a return to the ‘English’ liberalism of David Hume and Adam Smith – ‘the older liberalism’, as he called it, which was never ashamed of its links to ‘classical free-trade doctrine’. Mises admired English culture (and was happy to let it annex the Scotland of Hume and Smith) but he went on to ...”

“... nationalism, as well as his middle-finger politics and his ‘America First’ ranting, comes from David Duke, the former grand wizard of the KKK; from George Wallace, the segregationist governor and former presidential nominee; from Joe McCarthy, who thought America was being overrun by aliens; and from lynch-happy Pat Buchanan, protector of the rights of the ...”

“... or ‘patience’. The outbreak of the second intifada, in response to failed peace talks at Camp David in 2000 and Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to Temple Mount, wrong-footed Hamas. The leadership reacted by ramping up suicide bombings, but it was being led by events rather than leading them. The movement had been founded on a rejection of partition and ...”

“... said. To have in your life a problem play, to have it be a problem play because of your life.As David Mitchell notes in his introduction to this reissue of Medusa’s Ankles, the selected stories are as deep and broad as the three decades they cover, though the ones from Sugar and Other Stories (1987) are the most indispensable. Each is different from the ...”

“... raced to meet the expectations of their followers. (Unlike most governments, as the historian David Renton points out, the fascist parties in Italy and Germany became more radical once in office.) Fascism involves a form of collective behaviour that seems unaccountable. Many in the interwar period were slow to recognise the danger it posed, seeing fascism ...”