“... Nazi daily paper, had to report the destruction of the German Sixth Army. Merridale’s purpose may be to put the individual soldier in focus as a subject in his own right, but that doesn’t stop her from telling an ‘epic story’ of the fighting and dying in the shell of Stalingrad left after an annihilating raid by the Luftwaffe in August 1942. The ...”

“... there are loud expressions of satisfaction. The excitement quickly fades, though: soon the Syrians may need more than just cosmetic defiance. On 28 June, Israeli fighter jets flew over President Bashar al-Assad’s palace near the coastal town of Latakia. According to the state-run media, the jets reached the border and were chased away by anti-aircraft ...”

“... of Butler’s discussion of performativity, Saba Mahmood draws on Butler’s Foucauldian point’ may be left forever unfinished by some readers, perhaps unfairly, as the sentence in its entirety usually makes sense and has some relevance to Yurchak’s argument. As the profusion of luminaries suggests (and my list is only partial), Yurchak is not writing ...”

“... a consistency proof of an axiomatic system for analysis. Whatever his philosophical views may have been at the time, his motivation had nothing to do with undermining logical positivism or formalism. To understand Gödel’s intervention, and the way Goldstein has misconstrued it, we need to take account of some more logical terminology. A formal ...”

“... a conversation, acknowledging the presence and participation of the other. Two independent voices may be played by the same musician, on a keyboard, for instance, but they are more often given to two players, who must listen to each other. By no means all European music is predominantly contrapuntal; much of it is melody with harmony, the kind of music that ...”

“... on parental feeding right into their late teens, even in hunter-gatherer societies. Orangutans may stretch to an eight-year birth interval, but if humans waited till the older child was nutritionally independent, we would need a 15-year interval. There had to be a whole new factor in human upbringing, if the species was to survive at all. The new factor ...”

“... questions about the Rights of Man unimaginable to Jefferson or the Jacobins. Under what conditions may human body parts be commodified – seemingly mundane bits like skin, blood and corneas as well as fancier ones like eggs, sperm, fetal tissue, kidneys and, crucially, genes and personal genetic information? What place in our social classifications is to be ...”

“... between ‘storm in a teacup’ and ‘figment of Cicero’s imagination’. Catiline himself may have been a far-sighted radical (cancellation of debts could have been just what Rome needed in 63 BC); he might equally well have been an unprincipled terrorist. We cannot now tell. But there is a fair chance that he was driven to violence by a Consul ...”

“... There may be many readers who, on hearing of J.M. Coetzee’s Nobel Prize, immediately thought about the cost of clarity. There is so much, after all, missing from Coetzee’s distinguished books. His prose is precise, but blanched; in place of comedy there is only bitter irony (this is Coetzee’s large difference from Beckett, whom he so clearly admires); in place of society, with its domestic and familial affiliations, there is political society; and underfoot is often the tricky camber of allegory, insisting on pulling one’s step in certain directions ...”

“... prefer not to be adored for their lack of brains and their closeness to nature. ‘Love in men may be merely a drive,’ Kraus writes in Dicta and Contradicta, ‘but even the most thoughtless woman loves in the service of an idea. Even the woman that merely sacrifices to a stranger’s drives is morally superior to the man who only serves his ...”

“... to? It’s impossible to know! It’s impossible to say!’ (Jacques Normand for Fasquelle). ‘I may be dead from the neck up, but rack my brains as I may, I fail to understand why a man needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in his bed before falling asleep’ (Georges Boyer for Ollendorff ). As Tadié ...”

“... indicators, for the disorder’, and a consequent fear that ‘monolithic definitions of autism may in fact hinder the identification of successful therapies.’ Since there has been what Silverman calls a ‘resistance of autism, as a category, to resolve into a clear population in biological terms’, parents have been free to be pluralistic in their ...”

“... locked in the arms of the lover he is supposedly fleeing. The artist who painted those images may have been terrified of lust, but he was also entranced by it. By the time he painted Phyllis and Demophoön in 1870, Burne-Jones had been married for ten years and was reluctantly attempting to disentangle himself from the striking woman who had been the ...”

“... given rise to a multibillion-pound industry to which nobody pays any attention, an industry we may as well call the nonproliferation complex. It comprises a loose conglomeration of academic programmes, think tanks, NGOs, charitable foundations and government departments, all formally dedicated to the reduction of nuclear danger. Its twin goals are to stop ...”

“... of minorities (behind France but ahead of Germany), despite the hard turn against immigration; we may be sexist – according to the UN rapporteur on violence against women – but we’re not homophobic; and we’re no longer at the bottom of Unicef’s child well-being league table for rich countries, as we were in 2007. Britain’s unemployment rate is ...”