“... on cause and effect and the realities of state power – was a form Amis soon abandoned. It may not be a coincidence that he wrote it at a time when he and his friend Christopher Hitchens weren’t speaking, or so the papers said: Hitchens objected to a chapter in Koba the Dread that accused him of collusion with Stalinist crimes. Perhaps, with the ...”

“... technology and productivity all stagnate is hard to imagine – although present-day Japan may be coming close. But frontiers, or business opportunities, come in many forms that are often hard to spot ahead of one’s rivals. Nevertheless, Ikeda, a former financial bureaucrat, saw open frontiers beckoning to Japan from all points of the social and ...”

“... powerful armies – and a nuclear arsenal, the only one in the region. The atrocities of 7 October may be reminiscent of pogroms, but Israel is not the Pale of Settlement.As the historian Enzo Traverso has observed, the Jewish people ‘now occupies a quite unique position in the memories of the Western world. Its sufferings are proclaimed and the object of ...”

“... What​ a difference six inches can make. George Orwell was shot in the neck on 20 May 1937 while fighting in the Spanish Civil War for the POUM (roughly translatable as ‘The Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification’). He was six foot two. If he’d been five foot eight the bullet would have gone through his head ...”

“... it has wrought is due to seventeen years of wage stagnation, unprecedented in industrial times. It may be an act of noble honesty, political naivety or both, but Starmer and Reeves have evidently reasoned that they cannot set about promising a brighter future without confronting the present blight.More exciting for Westminster policy nerds has been the ...”

“... railways and the trade routes of global capitalism. Spreading from Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan) in May 1889, across continental Europe, it reached the United States by late December. The Pall Mall Gazette reported that ‘Londoners, and indeed all English people, will feel a certain amount of alarm, or at all events considerable interest, in the accounts which ...”

“... they’d let him get away with it, and, if not, he was at the end of his life anyway. Sebba may be right that his ‘recollections of the Rosenbergs have to be treated with extreme caution’, or at least some scepticism, but in twenty years no one has contradicted the substance of his account, and he often writes against his own interest. He says that ...”

“... meanings.’These words look back to work already done, and forward to a different future. But we may hear in them a note of exaltation that will sound strange to anyone who thinks about the teaching of poetry in modern universities. Perhaps we have lost confidence in the poets, as Richards himself partly did. Certainly most of us are not convinced that he ...”

“... business of the Jewish people.It was just the beginning of Sartre’s crisis with the Arabs. On 27 May, he began writing his introduction to the special issue, again affirming his ‘neutrality – or if you will – absence’. But his commitment to neutrality had already been severely tested by Nasser’s show of force in the Sinai. ‘The Jews threaten ...”

“... Francine du Plessix Gray – ‘Francine Duplicitous Gray’, as Roth called her. Interviewing may not have been Miller’s forte but what was his forte? He made such a skimpy mess of the Notes on the Text for Volume Three of Roth’s Library of America edition that Roth went apoplectic in a barrage of faxes that must have had little lightning bolts ...”

“... he was told. ‘Most of them are consecrated penitents. Every year there is a service when they may be consecrated. They are much respected by the others. When they die they are buried with the nuns. The others are buried in the common burial ground.’ One of the most revealing aspects of this snippet of conversation is how important the matter of where ...”

“... her hands as she tries to enter into a conversation among Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Theresa May and Christine Lagarde, who grimaces. It is reported that a ‘friendship tree’, given months earlier by Macron to Trump and ceremoniously planted by both on the White House lawn as a symbol of the ties that bind France and the US, immediately died.*Before ...”

“... has an approval rating of 38 per cent, Bush of 36 per cent, Blair of 30 per cent. Such eminence may seem perverse, but it is not unintelligible. Putin’s authority derives, in the first place, from the contrast with the ruler who made him. From a Western standpoint, Yeltsin’s regime was by no means a failure. By ramming through a more sweeping ...”

“... opinions and rather narrow tastes. Nonetheless he was very good at teaching one how to write. He may have been wrong in some of his literary judgments and ignorant in some areas of literature but he was good at getting rid of what was superfluous or phoney in a piece of writing. And he would be very insulting if one came out with some bit of ...”

“... and the self-interested actions for which the members of this Long Parliament became famous. It may also account for the paucity of sources from which historians can derive the Long Parliament’s history. The first half of Patterson’s study is an examination of those sources, from the publicly printed royal speeches that frequently opened sessions and ...”