“... climbing the cliff roads. This was the first contact on the mainland, and although the SRS finally took Bagnara, a defining characteristic of the campaign had emerged: the topography favoured defenders on the high ground, and consequently the conventional 3:1 manpower ratio required for military victories needed to be higher.Confirmation came six days later at ...”

“... League, with the title ‘How Not to Translate Marx’. The translator he had in mind was John Broadhouse, a pseudonym for the journalist Henry Mayers Hyndman, who was notorious both for his socialism and his pronounced antisemitism (he once said of Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she ‘inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx ...”

“... seized the shop, they returned to Vienna.But the event that Segal later singled out as decisive took place on the night of 9 November. Throughout the Reich, SS and SA officers conducted a pogrom: setting fire to synagogues, smashing and looting shops and businesses, beating up Jews and herding thirty thousand people into camps. Kristallnacht provoked ...”

“... productive, returning them to work after illness or injury. Social security would ensure that they took the necessary time off for rehabilitation and recuperation. All this would enable them to work more productively and for longer. Some form of gatekeeping would be needed, however, to make sure that those who said they were sick weren’t malingering. The ...”

“... Rampling, Paul Oakenfold, Johnny Walker and Nicky Holloway, who in 1987 went on holiday to Ibiza, took Ecstasy under the stars at the open-air club Amnesia, and watched DJ Alfredo play an unusually eclectic mix of pop, new wave, disco and US house as the sun came up. They came back to London and started their own parties, kickstarting the ‘second summer of ...”

“... tasselled affair inscribed in Victorian homily-Gothic lettering, God knew Elvis Was tired, so he Took him to Rest. The ‘Fantastic Elvis Presley frisbee’ is only £1.25. And you can even order ‘your very own Elvis painting or sketch from our special Elvis artist Tommy Heyburn. Mr Heyburn is easily the best Elvis artist today.’ Farther out in the ...”

“... saved or lost.’ She was sure that the devil is present in creation. She and the novelist John Hawkes had a lot to say to each other about the devil in the course of their correspondence, although in The Habit of Being we get only O’Connor’s portion of this exchange. (The trouble with books like this one is that the reader feels as if he or she ...”

“... returned together to America, and married in May 1929. By this time ‘Fuzzy’ was already seeing John Millet, psychiatrist, at the Austen Higgs Centre in Stockbridge. ‘Fuzzy’ was fatal. He was very handsome. He had genuine artistic talents. He insisted on the importance of extreme physical activity, but was himself fragile. He and Alice had eight ...”

“... like ‘composed’, ‘resolve’ or ‘tonic’, also have a psychological reference? The Greeks took very seriously music’s power to heal and assuage, just as Wagner insisted that the greatest absolute music could ‘heal’ and ‘cleanse’. In Parsifal, ‘Nur eine Waffe’ brings an unmistakable and profound sense of release – but from what, into ...”

“... a series of actions leading to the desired conclusion. Thus the beginnings of cognitive science took the general form of attempts to investigate a series of actions or events that lead to a designated goal. It need not of course be a single series; it can be a tree composed of many series culminating in the goal. But a series of what? Don’t we just recall ...”

“... signed the certificates accepting the plant – although he knew it was sub-standard. The director took his grandchildren away, but did not alert the town. Furthermore, he got the job through pulling strings. The confrontation is heated and believable. At its height Bessmertny intrudes with a pungent suggestion. You’re building the pyramids – the tombs of ...”

“... a triumphant ending, with the title ‘How I won the General Election’. As it was, the plot took the wrong twist and the title might more appropriately have become ‘The War Between the Generals’. One of the principal problems of the warring generals was an inability to agree on strategy. At David Owen’s insistence, the Alliance’s election ...”

“... world’. Berenson’s recorded utterances sound all too self-consciously sagacious. ‘Young John Carter Brown, who one day was to become director of the National Gallery of Art’, came with a plan ‘to prepare for a museum career by first taking a business course’. Berenson urged him to ‘look, look, look, until you are blind with looking, and out ...”

“... about the size and capability of the enemy forces. A day or two before the ‘invasion’, Sir John Glubb informed Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, that the Zionists had 65,000 trained men. Azzam was surprised by this but replied: ‘I expect it will be all right. I have arranged to get up seven hundred men from Libya.’ On being asked ...”

“... ovulation is spontaneous, and not the result of female orgasm, was discovered in the 1820s, but took thirty years or more to spread through the medical profession, and longer still to get through to patients. This ancient fallacy presumably encouraged men who wanted children to attend to their wives’ sexual needs. But what about couples who wanted to stop ...”