“... by major mutinies: some large towns were held by mutineers with local support for up to a week. In May 1949 two frontier battalions defected, with their officers, to the North. Meanwhile, guerrilla warfare broke out throughout much of the South, and was particularly strong on Cheju Island, off the south coast – the furthest point from North Korea. Cumings ...”

“... manoeuvres, he finally submitted his application for the ‘Habilitation’ at Heidelberg on 25 May 1918 (at the time of the final, apparently successful German breakthrough on the Western Front). It was not until December 1918, the very month of his conversion to Communism, that Lukacs received from Heidelberg the official letter rejecting his ...”

“... that’s what it means.’ Of all the rescues that the novel proposes, the most difficult may be this one: to restore to Jacques Austerlitz the individuality of his name and experience, to rescue the living privacy of the surname ‘Austerlitz’ from the dead, irrelevant publicity of the place-name ‘Austerlitz’. Jacques should not be a battle, or ...”

“... in the mode of Reyner Banham: freewheeling, spinning out ideas, theories and evaluations that may have their origin in the stony core of the built environment, but which spread to encompass most other aesthetic realms as well. Aesthetic but in Hatherley’s case also political: for it is the great strength of his writing – as well as its besetting ...”

“... committees in a mix of civilian clothes and military gear. The countryside has armed itself. In May I visited the mountain town of Sheikh Badr in Tartus province. Forty-three townsmen in the security forces had been killed; seven others had been captured or were missing. While I was in the mayor’s office he received news that a wounded soldier had just ...”

“... customs and superstitions: ‘When a woman gets married, she must not sew her own dress. The dress may not even be made in the house where she lives …’ The list is impressively various and detailed: I have no idea how much of it Erpenbeck invented. And its effect is strangely powerful, because it makes the business of love and marriage seem so ...”

“... disappoint. He admired Americans for their kindness, their respect for women (‘Husband and wife may be unhappy, but you seldom hear of a woman carrying the marks of a man’s brutality’), but above all for their generosity towards tramps and beggars. It’s not clear from his autobiography whether Davies had come across Whitman’s paean to the open road ...”

“... modern world as China and India, has implications for how we see American literature. Henry James may have lamented the social thinness of American history, and its apparent inability to generate great writing, but Stein’s formulation makes James look like an incorrigible 19th-century Europhile who failed to recognise that history specifically enjoined ...”

“... apt to prejudice people against her’. Souhami rushes to Cavell’s defence, suggesting that she may have been late to meals because she was with patients, and insisting that her ‘self-sufficiency’ was really the detachment that marks true selflessness. Whatever the reason, after qualifying as a staff nurse, she was not given charge of her own ...”

“... contemporaries, nature had begun to look like a solution (or an absolution). He realised that it may be our nature not to find nature reassuring, even in, or especially in, its sublimity. For Byron it was clearly not alluring – or rather, it was a temptation to be avoided – to be somehow other or more than oneself. Sexuality seemed more revealing to him ...”

“... joined together in a larger whole, under a leader who can claim to speak for all of them, Labour may be finished as an electoral force. That, though, raises a bigger question. Is democratic micro-entanglement consistent with wanting to win elections? Glasman, along with almost every other contributor to this volume, assumes that Blue Labour is a way of ...”

“... hostility towards Europe, which only reinforced the wider electorate’s allergy to what Theresa May described, when she was party chairman, as the – perceived – ‘nasty party’. But did any leader or electoral strategist really have much room for manoeuvre? Bale is acutely sensitive to the ways in which previous choices and established institutional ...”

“... a figure of fun – gave Europe its 19th century. Alexander’s embrace of the old-time religion may not have injured his commitment to constitutions, but it did provide him with a convenient alibi when the alliance he built began to be used as a bludgeon. His fear of revolutionary secret societies like the Carbonari, long encouraged by the aristocratic ...”

“... published in the US in June. James Wood reviewed it at length in the New Yorker. Heti, he said, ‘may well have identified a central dialectic of 21st-century postmodern being’, but he also complained that her ‘prose is what one might charitably call basic’. The radical feminist artist Chris Kraus compared the book to Mary McCarthy’s The Company She ...”

“... and ‘Her First Ball’ and in ‘The Voyage’ and ‘The Doll’s House’: stories set in what may seem to be an anywhere, but for her belonged in the city she left when she was a girl, her birthplace with its dark hills and narrow streets, its wind and harbour, its glittering little sea. Here’s her family, the house she grew up in, the summer holidays ...”