“... but often unspoken assumption about Western superiority’. He is particularly annoyed by the late John Plamenatz, who contrasted ‘the healthy “civic nationalism” of Western countries with the supposedly unhealthy nationalism of their Eastern counterparts’. Annoyed not least because Professor Plamenatz of All Souls was actually a Montenegrin. Given the ...”

“... million bikes in Germany on the eve of the war, underlining yet again that most Germans cycled or took public transport to work and thought of the motor car, if they thought of it at all, as a leisure vehicle. Ordinary Germans were right to be sceptical about the savings scheme. Not one saver got a Volkswagen: the money all went into arms production. So did ...”

“... back on stage a year later and complained he had lost ‘$35 million in an hour’. The journalist John Hockenberry was fired from New York Public Radio when old allegations of workplace bullying were suddenly deemed sufficient. This happened just before an article about his sexual behaviour was published. He is one of the few men who have attempted to write ...”

“... to other fields, and fractal geometry’s original applications were mainly non-economic. What took him back to the study of markets was an episode that can only be described as Mandelbrotian. In the week beginning 12 October 1987, the global stock-market boom that had started in 1982 began to experience turbulence, with a sharp fall on the Wednesday, high ...”

“... interests. Authors who drew most attention to their own form and language – novelists such as John Berger, Doris Lessing, or Rushdie himself; poets such as J.H. Prynne – were in this way among the most politically committed in the period. Stevenson’s prejudices are strongly aired in his chapters on poetry. He is less at ease discussing verse than he ...”

“... Infatuated with his own historical dream, according to which, ‘like Kokoschka, Schoenberg took his initial step into a new world of feeling within the framework of lyric poetry, but then quickly broke into the open with a radical turn to theatre,’ he ignores the all-important part which purely instrumental thought played in this critical phase of ...”

“... be learned from his numerous autobiographies. But Evelyn, who enjoyed a happy, normal childhood, took against not only his parents, their friends and the whole man-of-letters world that they, and particularly his father, inhabited, but also against his brother and his brother’s friends – despite the fact that it had been Alec who introduced him to the ...”

“... 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 ...”