“... to be implemented and that it was to be implemented quickly. The words of the US representative Arthur Goldberg were the ‘resolution is for implementation’, and on behalf of his government he pledged that ‘our diplomatic and political influence will be exerted ... to achieve a fair and equitable settlement so that all in the area may live in ...”

“... achievement and we mean to build on it.’ (And on the other side of the argument, there’s Arthur Scargill: ‘My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your ability to master words.’) The fact that Prescott minds being teased about this gives his touchiness a tragicomic edge. The accounts of early slights, almost ...”

“... to have a laugh. But he could have gone further.We know Ignatius Gallaher best from the story ‘A Little Cloud’ in Dubliners. He is a journalist in London back in Dublin for a brief visit. Gallaher is unmarried, he has a ‘travelled air, well-cut tweed suit and fearless accent’. He wears ‘a vivid orange tie’, calls the Dublin waiter garçon and ...”

“... has emerged in the twenty years since the death of Hubert Fichte, gay fiction is considered to be little better than a joke, usually a dirty one; there may or may not be a more pronounced homophobia in Germany than in other European countries, but I suspect the differences are more reasonably attributed to the fortuitous absence of ‘out’ gay novelists of ...”

“... to be manifest in daily life. Even a city boy like me can see evidence that the world is a little warmer than it was. Part of the problem is one of scale. Global warming is as a subject so much more important than almost anything else that it is difficult to frame or discuss. At the moment there is a global warming-related item on the news at least ...”

“... had manipulated Hindenberg into dissolving the Reichstag). Participation in this campaign was little short of suicidal, but Hobsbawm embarked on this, his ‘first piece of genuinely political work’, protected by the fantasy that it was like ‘playing in the Wild West’: ‘We would go into the apartment buildings and, starting on the top floor, push ...”

“... the theory being that, given unlimited aid, Israel will be assured of its security and prove a little more flexible. This has not happened. And, of course, Israel now sits on even greater amounts of Arab land, with occupation policies that are more brutally and blatantly repressive than those of most other 20th-century occupation regimes. Gideon Spiro, an ...”

“... on her psychology teacher, the 24-year-old John Money. In Frame’s probationary year teaching at Arthur Street School, she stiffened, avoiding the staff teas. This is where her autobiography and King’s retelling, based on interviews, diverge, but in both she swallows a packet of aspirin, and wakes the next morning relieved – nose bleeding, ears roaring ...”

“... sense of abandonment.’ The family lived in a $40-a-month apartment in the Hill (known locally as Little Harlem), a lively mixed community, a five-minute drive from downtown Pittsburgh. Wilson remembered his father being ‘mostly not there. You stayed out of his way if he was.’ But Wilson was privy to many of Fritz’s violent drunken scenes: throwing ...”

“... business, and it improved the standing of the Bundesrepublik with its Allied occupiers. But it has little relevance for those in the US who want to think about how reparations for slavery could be arranged.A revised Federal Compensation Act in 1956 also offered reparations to a narrowly delineated subset of German Jews who had suffered specific sorts of ...”

“... Berne to attend a convention of European socialists, whose delegates included Ramsay MacDonald and Arthur Henderson, and which produced nothing. The convention was designed as a continuation of the regular prewar gatherings of the Socialist International, at which various factions had squabbled and bickered before declaring their unshakeable class solidarity ...”

“... missing, nothing to regret. Ackroyd shadows his man across the relevant period map, with perhaps a little too much fondness for local colour. Spelling it out for a transatlantic audience who no longer believe that London exists – unless it’s awash with muffin men or swathed in a blanket of Ripper’s fog. Time behaves itself, the chronology is ...”

“... he took another bath, this time in Mozart. He wallowed in Mozart; he luxuriated in him; he let the little Viennese soak away all the dirt and disgustingness he had had to sit through in his office all day. On this particular evening he had been to the public baths, Covent Garden, where their seats were immediately behind the Home Secretary. He, too, was taking ...”

“... the neighbourhood boys they used to hang out with were dead or in jail by then, and Minnie saw how little her children were doing besides chase women and arrange transactions with petty thieves. Chico stole casually from his father’s business and only realised how serious it was when Frenchy said he would kill him if he ever did it again. So, you get the ...”

“... and one of the last, occurred at Salem in Massachusetts Bay Colony – it was the subject of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. It began when the minister’s nine-year-old daughter, Betty Parris, and her cousin, Abigail Williams, complained that they were being tormented by invisible beings. Three local women, convicted of bewitching them, named other ...”