“... the yeast of a few exceptional individuals really leaven the whole lump? Did Hugh Trevor-Roper and Peter Laslett better incarnate the ‘spirit of the age’ than the less ‘establishment’ A.J.P. Taylor or E.P. Thompson? Annan contrasted the reformist commitments of ‘our age’ with the homosexuality and communism of the Cambridge spies, but weren’t ...”

“... and the Colonial World. The early chapters consider a number of classic accounts of anthropophagy. Peter Hulme shows how the brief report of the ship’s doctor on Columbus’s second voyage in 1493, itself based on circumstantial evidence, was blown up out of all proportion by subsequent editors. Four or five human bones stolen from an abandoned village on ...”

“... craft? The answer is, scarcely at all. The last few pages of his text broach it, then peter out. Causes in The Historian’s Craft are a bit like classes in Marx’s Capital, a word followed by … This could be because the text, written in very difficult conditions during the war, is unfinished. But there are reasons for thinking that even had it ...”

“... Jewish musicians who have conducted, sung, played, directed or designed the operas, from Hermann Levi to Barenboim, Levine and Solti, they are by implication either dupes or complicit scoundrels. ‘The questions of Wagner’s antisemitism and Hitler’s exploitation of it are fundamental,’ Rose writes, ‘but what is ultimately at stake in banning Wagner ...”

“... fallacy Cosima supported from the other side, through her belief that a Jewish conductor (Hermann Levi) could not penetrate the sacred mystery? On the other hand, if we aren’t disturbed, what becomes of Wagner’s idealistic belief that a ‘true’ response to great music conditions man’s moral being? These problems aren’t equally important, of ...”

“... out an obnoxious member, they did not know how to do it. They sent the future Chief Rabbi, Saul Levi Mortiera, to get the advice of Venetian rabbis, who gave him the form of words. It appears that during the 17th century over two hundred and eighty members were excommunicated from the Amsterdam Spanish and Portuguese Jewish community, for non-payment of ...”

“... consciousness of the post-Revolutionary ‘new man’. An article by Richard Greeman – who, with Peter Sedgwick, began the Serge revival by translating some of his work during the 1960s, and is preparing a biography of his own – locates Serge’s literary Damascus in two experiences of death, one political, the other physical, that led to something like a ...”

“... far as it enables us to spot its destructive potential before it fully discloses itself. As Primo Levi wrote, ‘it happened, therefore it can happen again.’A re​ we, as Richard Seymour suggests, ‘in the early days of a new fascism’? In Disaster Nationalism, Seymour argues that in trying to understand the new far right, we have been looking in the ...”

“... wrote a paean to Marat to protest against Hitler’s rise to power. Decades later the success of Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade, adapted for film by Peter Brook, ensured that the myth ramified through the 1960s counterculture, with references in the music of Judy Collins and Love. As a student in suburban Los Angeles at ...”

“... school I was surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the ...”

“... together. Elena was now Helen, Mummy not Mami; Papa became Daddy; the boys were still Donald and Peter, of course, but they had far fewer words at their disposal by which to express themselves. They were now British – British refugees, to be exact – not just because their identity documents said so, but because their survival depended on it. And thus ...”

“... assembled a team of collaborators whose views were shaped by an evolving canon that included Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and, most significant of all, the work of Erving Goffman, which Ongaro translated for an Italian edition. In 1961, too, Goffman published ...”

“... Keith Thomas puts it, ‘changing gestural codes offer a key to changing social relationships.’ Peter Burke points out that the two historians who have done most to encourage this view are Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault. In The Civilising Process, first published in 1939, Elias argued that a rising European bourgeoisie sought to discipline itself by a ...”

“... Churchill’s heroic struggle or basking in its post-war glorification. Such ‘shame’, as Primo Levi calls the malaise felt by survivors of imprisonment, does not parade itself. There are political reasons, too, why the resistance hasn’t been chronicled more thoroughly – Bunting’s account is itself far from complete or accurate – and why there has ...”

“... of the remote south did have one or two positive consequences for Italian literature. Carlo Levi wrote Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli, while Moravia, Morante, Malaparte and Natalia Ginzburg all used their experiences of exile in their fiction. Not so Pavese; having arrived on the south coast of Calabria in August, he opens his diary on 6 October: That ...”