“... Jews, camel drivers and Polacks’) are the direct kin of those we see in Ragtime sailing into New York harbour (‘from Italy and Eastern Europe’) as the Little Boy’s Father sails out on the Roosevelt ‘after a champagne breakfast with the press’. In the novel they disembark to a lifetime of particularised misery, instead of perishing in a single ...”

“... human evil. The unvarnished records of the Auschwitz trials have yielded a work of some stature in Peter Weiss’s The Investigation, and even the sub-genre of the memoirs of Hitler’s dog has achieved ironic elevation in Grass’s Hundejahre. Closer to home, Michael Hamburger has devoted himself to bringing German poetry before us and to maintaining its ...”

“... and the family is diminished by one? We hear of him later sometimes, living in a penthouse in New York, or a dacha near Moscow. This was written in 1958 but when, 20 years later, I worked with Lindsay it was still his view of England, down to the bang in the street outside and the open window, both of which he inserted into the original draft of The Old ...”

“... Baby Hunger (published in the US as Creating a Life) was noted on the front page of the New York Times. But why the surprise? Only women buy this kind of book about women, and women know perfectly well that it’s hard to find love, that offices are unfriendly to mothers, that 40 is not the ideal age to try to get pregnant. They also know that early ...”

“... and ring mail. The smith clearly took as much pride in his work as the carpenter. The Vale of York hoard, which dates from the 920s, contains silver coins, a Frankish liturgical cup, arm rings and what’s called ‘hack silver’. Sunhild Kleingärtner and Gareth Williams carefully point out in the accompanying text that the hoard represents ...”

“... Revolution to the Civil War era, the picture became decidedly blurred, and Whiggery seemed to peter out. What was the connection between the two major upheavals of England’s so-called ‘century of revolutions’? How far was the Glorious Revolution of 1688 a consolidation of the gains of the chaotic English Revolution of the 1640s? The history of the ...”

“... in the United States than in Europe. Two historians, Nicholas Guyatt of the University of York and Luke Clossey of Simon Fraser University, have compiled a fascinating report on this, an extract from which recently appeared in the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History. After examining the profiles of 2400 historians in 60 large ...”

“... visit, during a tour in crippling heat of the ruined fortifications constructed around the port by Peter the Great, Wilhelm again forgot his instructions and buttonholed the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, on one of his latest hobby-horses, the need to establish a pan-European oil trust to compete with American Standard Oil. The ...”

“... the crunch (you know the type) – is assigned to the case. With the help of a beautiful young New York Times journalist, March uncovers a vast conspiracy, reaching all the way to the highest echelons of power: the Gestapo, it seems, is quietly disposing of everyone who attended a secret Nazi conference that took place at Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The ...”

“... as of the continual experimentation involved, he moved to Berlin to work in the office of Peter Behrens, ‘a colossus of daunting stature’. He had no contact with Behrens himself, but did learn about ‘rhythm and subtle relations and many other things previously unknown to me’. That admission must have cost him dear: he was strikingly ungrateful ...”

“... by tripping on ayahuasca, and later married her – who now works as a human resources exec in New York. Mystery surrounds the fate of Norm’s first wife, the mother of Penny’s older half-brothers – Patrick, a gentle semi-dropout, and Matt, an angry waste-disposal entrepreneur who’s projected, from the get-go, as a sexually threatening figure. He’s ...”

“... pioneering work of Samuel Johnson, and rival the efforts of 19th-century European lexicographers. Peter Gilliver, in The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (2016), characterises the movement that led to the formalisation of the Philological Society’s proposals as ‘a groundswell of what might be called lexicographic nationalism’, and the OED has ...”

“... Row suits, could easily be a real-life counterpart of Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. (It’s a nice touch that the affair gets a mention in her 1935 detective novel Gaudy Night. Wimsey himself had clearly been following it keenly.) The dishevelled, corduroy-clad communist Pollard has more than a whiff of Le Carré about him: in one ...”

“... were disappointed, judging by the catcalls and hissing at screenings from Berlin to Paris and New York. What they got was a lot of highfalutin symbolism involving horses and a glimpse or two of the upper torso of a shivering teenage girl.Still, it was enough to launch Kiesler’s Hollywood career. In 1937, she arrived in the United States as a new person, not ...”

“... Iread​ Peter Biskind’s book about the New Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, long ago. Apart from scraps of celebrity anecdote, what I remember of it now is something more diffuse, a mood associated with the mysterious figures of the producers: an impression of flared trousers and shirts with the two top buttons undone, collar points two feet apart, of tanned white skin, gold, nice teeth, the smell of tobacco and aftershave and deodorant, of men outwardly confident, hungry, vain, bullying, concupiscent and covetous, but also charming, garrulous, fascinating, prone to infatuations with strangers and their stories, flitting from one intense interest to another, even as they held on stubbornly to ideas for years until the money and the creatives could be married and a film born ...”