“... leaders walked out during a speech he made when he was the head of the IDF’s Central Command in May 1987 because he used the word ‘occupation’ to describe Israel’s presence in the West Bank. They returned to their seats only after he agreed to repeat his talk without using that word. While the IDF, with the help of Shin Bet, is somehow able to locate ...”

“... new friend, invited her once to Haworth, and told her a good deal about the sad family history. It may have been for these reasons that Patrick Brontë commissioned Gaskell to write his daughter’s biography, a task that could have been made to order for her. In the first volume she set her motherless heroine as a domestic, shy but compassionate feminine ...”

“... coalition would have disintegrated. Mussolini could never have won the war for Hitler but it may well be that he lost it. Kershaw’s ten decisions are really only eight, for he splits into two both Roosevelt’s resolve to aid Britain and Japan’s resolve to go to war. This is unnecessary. The fascination lies not so much in the decisions as in the ...”

“... But that only makes my enjoyment of your artistry more of a subjection.’ Worth notes that James may have been more impressed than he was willing to admit. After Hauntings appeared, he returned to writing supernatural fiction, aligning himself with Lee’s reformulation of the mid-century conventions. His equivocal The Turn of the Screw (1898) has much in ...”

“... in at the thick end of eight hundred pages across eighty chapters, when Hegel says quantity itself may be a quality? When after a book and a half’s worth there is another book’s worth, and more, to come? The modestly titled Story of a Life is in fact only half the story (it’s the first three volumes of a set of six), so that we finish it, if we ...”

“... the last, to employ the information dump as a literary technique. But this is some dump.Trevelyan may well have conceived of Two Thousand Million Man-Power as the sort of novel of ideas Bennett would never have attempted. There’s a clue in the title. The phrase occurs in Ian Colvin’s ‘Social Survey of the World To-Day’, a chapter in the eighth and ...”

“... him, writing: ‘All of us who were at [the university of] Basle have come to nothing.’ This may not have been baseless self-deprecation: an acquaintance warned him that ‘I have never seen students rise. They are always more remiss and prone to slacking.’ Rütiner noted ruefully how this had been said ‘in a harsh tone, as if they were reproaching ...”

“... Italian, Catholic, a pianist, remarried – and an ageing Protestant Swiss-German father. There may be a brother, maybe dead, there may be a grandmother who likes flowers better than people (‘It only seems like a nice thing. Taking an interest in nature’). It’s a world of fine houses, good ...”

“... my maturity, at bus stops, in shops, and of course up and down the Kilburn High Road … The words may be different but the spirit is the same.’As she worked on the play, Smith noticed ‘sympathetic rhymes’ between Chaucer’s period and her own. In Alysoun’s insistence on women’s ‘sovereigntee’ over men, for instance, Smith sees an emphasis on ...”

“... after Charles Wager, the first lord of the Admiralty and mastermind of the secret mission. In May 1741, having already lost dozens of its crew to disease, the Wager ran aground in the fearsome seas off the coast of Chile. Of the ship’s original complement of around 250 sailors and soldiers, only 145 men survived the wreck and made it to a ...”

“... worked in Bomberg’s shop, replacing another Jewish scholar who had converted to Christianity: ‘May his soul be bound up in a bag full of holes,’ Levita swore. Together, Bomberg and Levita printed an Aramaic-Hebrew dictionary and the Masoret Hamasoret, a compendium of the correct spelling and notation of every word in the Hebrew Bible. Levita also worked ...”

“... Devil’s Due’, a prose text published in the Examiner twenty years earlier, may also have been printed in pamphlet form for private distribution. Lo and behold, a few months later, Wise himself discovered just such a volume.As with Barrett Browning’s Sonnets, Wise didn’t simply counterfeit books: he also manufactured their ...”

“... the first place? The wish to pull narratives together into a unified whole is often quixotic. It may be necessary where we have some reason to think that our stories are in conflict and that the conflict can only be abated by finding some larger story into which they can be fitted. But Dennett makes clear that this is not true of the manifest and scientific ...”

“... today – to the PLO.The bequest was the third of thirteen listed in his will of 7 May 1975, after another, larger one to the Catholic Missions Society of America, Maryknoll Fathers. There was no ringing oratory: he simply directed the money to go to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, 101 Park Avenue in New York, or if they had ...”

“... On​ 23 May 2014, a fire broke out in the Mackintosh Building of the Glasgow School of Art, destroying its library. The loss to the Mack, as it’s generally known, Glasgow’s most famous building and possibly the greatest creation of its principal designer, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, elicited tributes and sympathy from around the world ...”