“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... she has been appointed professor of social and political thought; the weekend after, she feels a little ill. A couple of months later, advanced ovarian cancer is found, and although she is able to finish the papers that will be published as Mourning Becomes the Law (1996), she doesn’t feel strong enough to start another major book. A friend suggests she ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and the good saw the affair as the story of a mean old television Goliath bullying a helpless little lefty David. The resulting goodwill was skilfully used to support the Institute of Ideas, which sprang from LM’s ashes. Others found in this miserable story an opportunity to let rip. ‘RCP members were the first to imitate neo-Nazis and deny the ...”

“... lords and knights. Pierre will similarly come to see the faults of his father mirrored in the little portrait he has cherished of him as a debonair young man, a portrait that, once he is persuaded by the story of Isabel, he will throw into the fire. Being more exactingly literary than his mother, Pierre is haunted early on less by Romeo and Juliet than by ...”

“... what made the killing so unsettling. It’s possible, of course, that Juliano’s murder had little to do with his work and more to do with the man himself. The most important question may not be who killed him, but why his killer, or killers, believed they could eliminate him with impunity. Whoever killed him knew that no one in the camp would rush to ...”

“... Argentinian beef. The Agriculture Minister, Nick Brown, is accused of doing too much and doing too little. The questions surrounding the foot and mouth epidemic – where will it all end? how did it all start? – might be understood to accord with anxiety about every aspect of British agriculture today. The worst has not been and gone. It is yet to ...”