“... going. ‘We were blocked in the town, and at night they terrorised other villages.’ Then in mid-May there was a rumour that the KLA planned to attack the police and Albanians were advised to leave to avoid reprisals. The majority did, decamping to Malishevo and neighbouring villages to live with relatives and friends. Sherif Gashi, a retired primary school ...”

“... interview with Le Figaro, conducted two weeks after 9/11, Rodinson remarked that ‘the temptation may be strong to equate [Islam] to a kind of barbarism. This must obviously be resisted, for Islam is also the winged words of the great Muslim thinkers.’Rodinson begins by describing the world into which Muhammad was born. Rome besieged by ...”

“... duke, a dotty recluse who prowled through underground mazes dug beneath his palace near Worksop, may have been indulging vaguely liberal prejudices. Today the tall stone pedestal survives: ‘In Gratitude for His Private Kindness, In Honor to His Publick Virtue’. Holes and scars suggest that there were once more inscriptions.Queen Victoria ordered the word ...”

“... Act with just five dissenting votes in the House and the Senate.National trade restrictions may be unwise, even cruel, but a government’s ban on its own trade with another country is a legitimate part of statecraft. American embargos are of a different order, since the US is in effect asserting that it is illegal for anyone, anywhere, to deal with ...”

“... can never do justice to the object; it is foreign to it, as if indifferent. But the unknown name may also hurl us into a world of ideas and images … where we encounter things wondrous and strange and come back full of them.’ In November 1927, Magritte went a step further with his ‘metamorphosis’ paintings, which show ‘an object merging into an ...”

“... in the Dirty Realist era of short fiction, his work was mostly out of print again.His realism may not be quite as dirty as Raymond Carver’s but the title story of The Hurly Burly encapsulates what’s enduring about Coppard. Split into three sections over twelve pages, it’s centred on Phemy, ‘a charity girl taken from the workhouse’, who at 21 is ...”

“... party. If there is little that resembles a distinctly northern civil society (though this may be changing), neither is there much sign of an ‘official North’ as constructed by the state. What does exist is ‘no more than a caprice of the Whitehall mind’, its boundaries flowing around a series of ill-fated ministries and schemes. The North has ...”

“... and people from former French colonies to France – but networks of family and friends who may have made earlier journeys, or just a person’s temperament, also play a role. Another major factor is the asylum policy of particular EU member states: how quickly and favourably they process claims and what sort of living conditions asylum seekers are kept ...”

“... Had he known about it himself? He retires from the force but lives on in San Francisco in what may be masochism or self-loathing. As Hitchcock depicts it, San Francisco is a steep, perilous place – and a character in the film. If the city is not the best place for him, does Scottie’s vertigo speak to a deeper uneasiness? Scottie is played by James ...”

“... up and down university corridors holding highly radioactive materials tight against his chest may have contributed to the stomach cancer that killed Fermi in his fifties.) Fermi was special in his generation of physicists in combining both theoretical and experimental skills, one sense – specific to physics – in which he knew everything. Gesturing at ...”

“... bureaucrat, diplomat, sparkling conversationalist and incorrigible womaniser – that the reader may despair of conceiving any overall project undertaken by the man baptised Marie-Henri Beyle in 1783. Aside from ‘Stendhal’ there were scores of pseudonyms, any number of unfinished writings and thousands of letters and journal pages in which Beyle often ...”

“... to write up a pretty good ‘pastiche of [his guests’] conversational style’. History may beg to differ. The early recordings are painfully stagey. The first, from 1951, features Margaret Lockwood (best known for playing feisty period heroines opposite James Mason, who himself did Desert Island Discs in 1961 and 1981) sounding as if she’s ...”

“... important to Freud that psychoanalysis should not become a cult of the irrational. The unconscious may be disreputable, but the psychoanalyst must not be. And yet Freud’s description of the unconscious was a threat to, and a parody of, the more respectable versions of professional competence. If a psychoanalyst knows what’s in the unconscious, or knows how ...”

“... we last see her, she has hesitantly embarked on a career in television.) But while Frederica may have no intention of writing that ‘long novel by Proust out of George Eliot’, the long novels in which she figures are clearly marked by the genetic traces of that improbable couple – although their bloodlines have been hopelessly complicated by an ...”

“... going to be future practice in written history? Most readers will hope that it won’t be, and may ask why such a long book could not find a few more pages for notes. Judt sensibly avoids paying too much attention to individual political parties. For example, he is interested in social democracy as a European ideology which rises and falls, but not much in ...”