“... to the last. There is, however, one likely positive outcome. Like in a good Bible story, Lieberman may be undone by his own machinations. During the last Knesset, he suggested raising the electoral threshold from 2 per cent to 3.25 per cent, as a way of excluding Arab parties. As a result, the Jewish-Arab List, the National Democratic Assembly, the United Arab ...”

“... end of the Cold War. The colours are not as vibrant as you remembered them. Amid the letdown, you may feel called on to provide some compensatory emotion of your own, like the young TV producer in Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, as she contemplates the Rothko reproductions on her walls: ‘She still felt – or could, if she kept the overhead ...”

“... in and out of our lives like a sort of extreme niece or nephew’. (If realised, this fantasy may have caused her husband some ‘cognitive dissonance’ of his own – regret at having missed out on years of conventional fatherhood and on the joy of having a child with the woman he’s married to and actually loves.) Daum agonises; her husband proves a ...”

“... On​ 18 May 1961, towards the end of Session 45 of the Eichmann trial, Judge Halevi asked State Prosecutor Bar-Or if he’d finished submitting into evidence all the documents relevant to the Theresienstadt camp. Bar-Or said he had, though of course there was also ‘the well-known book by Dr John Adler’: ‘This is the outstanding book about Theresienstadt, and it is called Theresienstadt ...”

“... girlfriend, a poor but pretty ballad-seller, is being violently interrupted by an older woman who may be his wife, and who, if we believe the account of the picture by Hogarth’s friend Jean André Rouquet, is also pregnant. The two women are rivals in politics as well as in love, the younger selling pro-Hanoverian papers, the older Jacobite ones. Apart from ...”

“... 1979; he returns so badly beaten that he’s almost unrecognisable. There’s a suspicion that he may have betrayed, under torture, a close friend, whose televised hanging takes place in the National Basketball Stadium in front of a large crowd. At the very least he’s guilty of recklessness, for harbouring opinions and literature hostile to the Gaddafi ...”

“... guide. Once slim, pocketable and beige, the volumes are now black, thick, and less handy. This may be the last print edition of the series. A digital version would expand the guides’ uses: and if you don’t have the right sort of imagination to visualise interiors or exteriors from written detail alone – I struggle – then virtual tours would ...”

“... about.She doesn’t get accepted onto the seminar. Selin notices things, but although they may be notable in themselves, they aren’t always the sort of thing other people think matters. In another interview, for an art class, the instructor looks over her portfolio while she stares out of the window ‘at two squirrels running up a tree. One squirrel ...”

“... to the widespread Russian flu of the 1890s; it’s also possible that, being in peak fitness, they may have had a damagingly brisk immune response. Pregnant women were particularly vulnerable.The flu wasn’t Spanish at all. The name stuck when in May 1918 the Spanish king, the prime minister and his entire cabinet all came ...”

“... ineradicable – ‘Daesh is in our hearts and minds’ – and they worry that the present moment may only be a pause in the violence. The anxiety is understandable, but the threat may be long-term rather than immediate: SDF commanders say that IS is not carrying out guerrilla attacks, and though there are frequent rumours ...”

“... onyx, the name of which derives directly from the Greek for ‘claw’ or ‘fingernail’). These may have been conventional similes, but Barry takes them seriously and he himself proposes, not quite plausibly, that Purbeck marble was ‘very likely regarded as a substitute for imperial porphyry’.He is unimpressed by the popular idea that the citizens of ...”

“... foetus and that the female’s ovum was no more than nutriment for their masculine structuring – may have been wayward; but he had provided a firm image against which others could pit their minds, an image enlivened by similes from more familiar scales of experience. His new microbiology captivated because even while it giddied the imagination, pointing ...”

“... picture on them. Yet Kircher went wrong on almost every point of fact, and some of his mistakes may not have been innocent. The marble tablet that first informed him he had made a miraculous discovery has disappeared without trace. Indeed, it may never have existed, and no other physical evidence connects the church to ...”

“... posted on social media likening Xi to Winnie the Pooh. New translations or illustrated versions may well be denied an ISBN, and so may existing editions: ISBNs have to be renewed every five to ten years, depending on the contract. Ricardo Piglia’s Plata Quemada was abandoned by the publisher after the translation was ...”

“... Charlottesville gives her a place only because he worries that her scholarship-student boyfriend may get lonely in her absence and ‘become a danger to himself and white women’. Zink has a lot of fun giving the mother, Meg, a chance to expound Foucault’s theories of sexuality to an encounter group for unhappy smalltown housewives. (One of them recalls ...”