“... a peasant nation like France, it is better to have someone whose origins, modest though they may be, lie deep in the entrails of our soil, rather than a subtle Talmudist.’ During the war Blum was imprisoned, first in France, then at Buchenwald and Dachau. He died in 1950. Birnbaum, a well-known historian and sociologist of French Jewry, has written a ...”

“... his conservative military outlook. Contact was established thanks largely to Jean Moulin, and in May 1943 the Conseil national de la Résistance (CNR) was set up, bringing together all the main Resistance movements with de Gaulle as its head, even if this was something of a marriage of convenience. For the Resistance groups, alignment with de Gaulle brought ...”

“... not all forest but is largely made up of human bodies – and not the adumbrations of bodies that may be found in a Forest by Ernst, but palpable flesh and muscle and bone and at the top right an agonised head thrown back. These straining, densely-muscled trunks and limbs locked in a Herculean struggle could well be an allusion, which I cannot yet ...”

“... a challenge shared by both historians and anthropologists. Even if Clendinnen’s interpretation may not command universal assent, it will certainly enjoy a wide readership and elicit vigorous debate. It sent me scurrying back to Sahagun, Bernal Diaz, and other 16th-century chronicles which offer such a profusion of data on so many aspects of Mexica history ...”

“... pathetically out of his depth as minister. Much the same was true of the convertibility crisis. By May 1947, the Treasury knew that import cuts were needed to halt the dollar drain, and warned accordingly. Again and again, ministers dithered, until, in the end, the crisis forced their hands. After 1947, however, there were no more horror stories of this ...”

“... to find examples of such things as female networking. The word ‘gender’ does not appear. This may be no bad thing, but Castor’s readers would have had a better idea of the ‘individual experiences’ of the women she writes about if she had included a fuller discussion of the nature of medieval queenship. Central to that was the queen’s ...”

“... for the lost glories of Fulton, and never even asks whether the civil servants who buried it may have been right. Yet one of the few clear lessons of the last twenty years is that that sort of 1960s scientism is nonsense, that the ‘cult of the generalist’ is much less dangerous than the ‘cult of the specialist’ and that the notion of a ...”

“... standards for judging the noise, the fear, the savagery. ‘Here,’ he wrote from Verdun in May 1916, ‘it is extermination on the ground.’ He told her about the never-ending artillery duel, the comrade who was cut in two by shrapnel, the gas attacks, the dismembered, stinking corpses of horses – everything that newsreels, photographs, newspapers ...”

“... it on are not just topographically open but public, a social as well as a physical expanse, we may begin to think that there is a great deal in them to disable. From the outset, agoraphobia has been regarded by some commentators as an entirely proportionate response to the escalating dangers of modern life. In 1889, in an angry critique of modern urban ...”

“... on what he regards as the abuse of old words. Professional linguists take a calmer view, and may even go beyond the limits of mere description and argue that change can tend to renovation rather than decadence. The State of the Language is a large and defeatingly miscellaneous collection which represents these points of view and a great many more ...”

“... David Lockwood is the sociologist’s sociologist in the same way that Ken Rosewall used to be the tennis player’s tennis player: he’s the one the other pros turn out to watch. But you need to know the fixture list. To switch to an older metaphor, he is apt not only to hide his light under a bushel but to hide the bushel as well ...”

“... David Benedictus is the Editor of Readings for BBC Radio’s Book at Bedtime. His Sunny Intervals and Showers is ill-suited for late-night reading, since it is not good to have the mind quickened from torpor by such speculations as ‘What happened to all the water in Noah’s Flood?’ or ‘Can the beatings of a butterfly’s wings start a typhoon?’ or, on a more practical level, ‘Could I have dealt with a mischievous fireball in the kitchen as summarily as that (unnamed) Smethwick housewife who “courageously sent it packing, and suffered nothing more serious than a burnt frock”?’ Still less does it assist slumber to reflect on the implications of that 1990 Sun headline (surely the longest Sun headline ever written) which said: ‘Britain has gone sex-crazy as red-hot lovers rush to do it in the great outdoors, say experts ...”

“... indirect style, but his slightly stagey horror at the likely excesses of the first-person mode may nonetheless strike a chord with readers of a variety of free-running or confessional forms, not just novels (think Christmas circular letters). But what about autobiography or memoir? Surely here self-revelation is of the essence. Yet James’s stricture ...”

“... call him an artist. This suggestion, under the rapid wit of the dialogue and the scene shifts, may have done most to compel the admiration of the first grateful viewers of Citizen Kane. Welles’s own ‘presence in the picture’, Otis Ferguson wrote, ‘is always a vital thing, an object of fascination to the beholder. In fact, without him the picture ...”

“... are commonly brought up to show that the modernist impetus survived in the generation after Pound: David Jones, Anglo-Welshman; Basil Bunting, Northumbrian Englishman; and Hugh MacDiarmid, Lowland Scot. The claim for Jones seems the weakest: it is advanced by Jones’s admirers, not by the poet himself, who took no interest in the question, having other fish ...”