“... for the lovely atomic spread in the gut as the liquor explodes within. Vodka is a great drink. It may lack the subtleties of Scotch and the bourgeois splendour of brandy: but in its craggy purity, it stands on a peak of its own. Pokhlebkin did not set out to write a history of vodka, however. His commission, in the early Eighties, was both more limited and of ...”

“... The imagery of the last stanza of one derives from black-and-white Russian movies. There may have been a further reason, not mentioned by Isherwood, why we were drawn to the young Germans of ten years after 1918. This is to be found in a poem of the First World War, Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’, in which he imagines a conversation between ...”

“... who has wondered whether the history of the United States can be forced into a Thatcherite mould may well find the book of interest. Johnson announces at the outset that he comes to American history ‘completely fresh’, with no qualifications other than a love of the country and a willingness to immerse himself in the literature of its past. It’s true ...”

“... unfortunately, both could be found in England well before the Black Death, though their numbers may well have increased later as a way of using productive land from which the plough had retreated. The death of a third to a half of the population was obviously a disaster, but it needs more than Thirsk’s observation that ‘not only was the demand for food ...”

“... the Roof Beam Carpenters’ occupied 60 pages of one issue of the New Yorker in November 1955. In May 1957, there was ‘Zooey’, which ran to more than one hundred pages. The New Yorker at this time was the boy Updike’s literary home – his ideal home, he has said – and as a ‘Talk of the Town’ wordsmith he was honing a few heart-shaped locutions of ...”

“... artists inevitably construct and invent their representations of American experience, whatever we may mean by this vague, polymorphous concept, rather than simply revealing a pre-existing entity through a transparent lens. The metaphor is misleading from the start. Certainly, Hughes’s project cannot be faulted on the basis of coverage: it starts out with ...”

“... civil servants for Mastermind, but then he is indeed a retired civil servant. Why, the reader may wonder, did he choose the period 1793 to 1816? Was this age richer in horrors than any other? There is no way of knowing. Quoted here is an estimate of 1812 that ‘perhaps not less than five thousand natives of these islands perish yearly at sea.’ The ...”

“... are enclosed apartment complexes. Small ones consist of a couple of buildings, big ones may be the size of a small town. The community I live in was built in the 1980s by several government departments, which allocated the apartments to their staff. Some resourceful departments still act as real estate developers, building communities and selling ...”

“... the imminent arrival of the ambulance, I am seized by the thought that I should shower, since it may be a while before I get to wash again. Afterwards, I sit in a chair and wait.Around midnight, L. opens the door to two tall young paramedics, dressed in green and with face masks and goggles. They surge up the stairs into the little back room, seeming to fill ...”

“... in September 1931, or its navy’s assault on Shanghai in January 1932. All three answers may be correct, since the Japanese army and navy had different policies and objectives, and were fully capable of starting wars without consulting each other, and indeed of starting wars to gain advantage over each other. For other historians, the important ...”

“... allows us a glimpse of what he read and when. It’s clear he read a great deal and some of it may now seem esoteric – Socrates Scholasticus’s Historia Ecclesiastica, for instance – but there is little that is unusual for the time. Nor is there anything that suggests an early radicalism. The histories he read between 1639 and 1643 must have informed ...”

“... a successor to the International Women’s Peace Conference of 1915, held its first meeting in May 1919 in neutral Zurich, despite Allied governments’ refusal to grant visas to the delegates. The representatives from the Central Powers bore marks of extreme hunger and suffering – the conference was all the more important for them because they had few ...”

“... G.E. Moore, drily reported that the Tractatus was ‘a work of genius, but be that as it may’ met the requirements for a PhD. The rest of Wittgenstein’s work was published after his death, and a lot of it abandons academic decorum for aphorisms, snatches of dialogue, cryptic musings, teasing questions and homely images. Benjamin, too, is a master ...”

“... in modern scientific thinking. He suggests – without ever labouring the point – that we may wish to keep an eye on whether other more respectable modern sciences, data science in particular, may also sometimes incline towards bullshit. But just as important, in Boxer’s hands astrology is a playground. Whether he ...”

“... technology to get ahead of the virus was already here, we thought. We just needed to deploy it.By May there were more than fifty new testing methods either published in journals or deposited on the BioRxiv pre-print server, an open access repository for papers in the biological sciences. People came up with some great ideas. A group in San Francisco developed ...”