“... Cade/ Jack Smith, Jack Moon, poor Jack of every trade.’ With the line, ‘One of the Lords of No Man’s Land, good Lob’, we get a topical piece of ambiguity: the poem was written in 1915, when Thomas had already enlisted (he was killed at Arras in 1917). Thomas set out to shape his poetry in ways inevitably, rather than deliberately, English: he made the ...”

“... dozen settings and scores of characters, each treated with impartial sympathy and curiosity. This man is a general, that one a physicist, the next, Eichmann. Grossman was also brave enough to equate the Nazi camps with Stalin’s gulags: a truth-telling for which he and the book were both made to suffer. Life and Fate was completed in 1960, but not published ...”

“... In Dante’s Inferno the serpentine Gerione, a monster with the counterfeit face of a beautiful man and a sting in his scorpion tail, carries Dante and Virgil down to hell on his back. Gustave Doré gave him the wings of a giant bat. Caravaggio borrowed eagle’s wings from Orazio Gentileschi for his figure of Eros: they seem to have been a most covetable ...”

“... great conurbations. Considered as a people-mover, the elevator ranks with those other epochal Fin-de-Siècle inventions, the motor car and the aeroplane. Like them, it combines high speed with a high degree of insulation from the outside world. It’s a vertical bullet train, a space rocket forever stuck in its silo – at least until the moment in Tim ...”

“... On 6 April, Dowd, certain that the hierarchy might listen better if criticism of them came from a man rather than a woman, quoted from her ‘conservative and devout’ brother Kevin’s views on where the Church was going, mentioning that she had learned, ‘shockingly’, that she and her brother ‘agreed on some things’. ‘Vatican II made me ...”

“... involving the whole rigmarole of the Party Conference, they have made any leader impregnable, de facto, until such time as he or she wants to quit. This was hardly the intention in 1981! Together with the ever-increasing speed of ‘events’ – the greatest influence, as Macmillan has told us, on any administration – patronage inoculates governments ...”

“... occupied territory and convincing Egypt and Syria to recognise the ‘Zionist entity’, at least de facto, by negotiating with it through him. Indyk’s account, while adding little to the historical record, makes exciting reading. And despite his veneration for Kissinger, Indyk acknowledges that the elaborate diplomatic manoeuvring was an exercise in damage ...”

“... or Esau’s pottage.’ In 1933, Hourani went up to Oxford, to read PPE: ‘a very thin young man with luminous green eyes and a diaphanous complexion’, according to his friend Charles Issawi. After graduating, he worked for Chatham House and the Foreign Office, before becoming a fellow of Magdalen and subsequently director of the Middle East Centre at ...”

“... Ball himself intoned these nonsensical syllables, he stood before the audience as rigid as the Tin Man, ensheathed in tubes of silver-painted cardboard. The poet Tristan Tzara described Taeuber’s performance in the same piece: a ‘delirious oddity in the spider of the hand vibrates rhythm rapidly rising to the paroxysm of a mocking capriciously beautiful ...”

“... earlier on the first Index Librorum Prohibitorum, issued in the Counter-Reformation pontificate of Paul IV, on the suspect grounds that they had fuelled the corruption of French politics. In the preface to the Six Books of the Commonwealth of 1576, Jean Bodin talks of ‘the delightful principles of Machiavelli, who lays down impiety and injustice as dual ...”

“... It is a fundamental part of the male Western musical stage that the most large-scale, lavish, man-made performances should focus on one woman’s self-abandoned, isolated voicing of pain. Dido, Ariadne, Butterfly abandoned-fine. Theseus, Heracles, Attila abandoned? No: Heracles mad, Prometheus bound, Don Carlos betrayed. Other bad things happen to ...”

“... and unashamed, she once performed the original act or sin of flouting God’s will and of bringing man to full knowledge of himself. Since that time she has served as a constant reminder of the fallen state, and, to Baudelaire, was only tolerable when her body was corseted, her legs disguised by a crinoline, her arms immobilised by the dropped sleeves of her ...”

“... dispute over the uniqueness of Nazi crime. Fest was a handsome, restless, rather unhappy man. In postwar West Germany, he never fitted into any of the conventional slots. He had no time at all for Soviet socialism, which he considered an early variant of the virus that later produced the Nazis, or for any Western form of Marxism. But although a ...”

“... narrative: of self-instruction, of real or imagined progress, of an artistic career. Gayford’s Man with a Blue Scarf is a narrative of a single episode: his seven-month sitting for the picture of his title. Structured like a journal, with each entry amounting to a kind of brushstroke, it is one of the best books about art, and the making of art, that I ...”

“... Days of Hope, 1915: The Death of Innocence, Somme, They Called It Passchendaele, The Roses of No Man’s Land, To the Last Man: Spring 1918) are a fairly devastating moral education for the reader. And once you begin to delve, as I have done, into the netherworld of popular military history – battlefield guides, memorial ...”