“... it. But no revival followed. ‘The Yiddish-speaking public voted with its feet,’ the journalist Michael Ohad wrote. ‘Our calculations were wrong. Di Megile wasn’t the swallow that heralded Yiddish’s revival. Di Megile was the wreath we laid on its grave.’ The 1967 war was a turning point for Yiddish, or at least Eastern European Ashkenazi ...”

“... in the selection at the BL, prefer quieter, more personal episodes to large-scale violence: the young Alexander’s taming of the horse Bucephalas; his education under Aristotle; his devotion to his close friend (and possible lover) Hephaestion; his marriage to Roxane, an Iranian chieftain’s daughter. Such moments soften the hard edges of the historical ...”

“... calls them up are they recognised as such. Paradise has to be lost before it can be gained. The young Buddhists couldn’t enjoy themselves catching fish, but they used to watch the Christian children fishing from the river-bank. Nor could they properly catch bait for their friends, though they might, speechlessly and as it were absent-mindedly, point out ...”

“... admirer, Francis Wyndham, stayed non-committal about the subject-matter: ‘The narrator is a young girl in love with a married man. That is the “story”.’ Wyndham proved not to be cautious enough. From the Journals now published it would seem that not one but two or even perhaps three love affairs are referred to in various passages, although the ...”

“... the work at a loss or not at all. At the start of his brief tenure as lord chancellor in 2015 Michael Gove got the diagnosis right when he said that the UK has a two-tier justice system in criminal law, favouring the rich at the expense of everyone else: The waste and inefficiency inherent in such a system are obvious. But perhaps even more unforgivable ...”

“... be a greater weight of plastic in the seas than fish. The secretary of state for the environment, Michael Gove, watching Blue Planet 2 and moved by images of, among other things, a turtle caught in plastic, tweeted that ‘the imperative to do more to tackle plastic in our oceans is clear.’ What should be done? New laws could be passed. But that will help ...”

“... than battering helplessly on the established centres of power: the Anti-Nazi League drew young enthusiasts from a wide political spectrum. The National Front, in its turn, needed the Anti-Nazi League (or some equivalent). The prospect of a legitimised punch-up was one of the recruiting draws of the NF. The confrontations with the Anti-Nazi League ...”

“... like Air Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, who from safe offices and Ops Rooms sent so many young men to futile and agonising deaths. The Dam Busters was made in 1954, when the myth of Bomber Command’s strategic success was still relatively unscathed by revisionist historians.* Harris is portrayed in it without criticism – indeed, as a kind of wise ...”

“... priest to a 1950s schoolgirl and a modern-day climate scientist. In the earliest of the subplots a young girl called NaNay sets out to prove to her tribe that she is a seer: taking on Helm is a way of testing the power of her visions and prophecies. Later characters attempt to subjugate or domesticate the wind. Helm took Hall twenty years to write. She seems ...”

“... elected in 1982, long before that distant nirvana of ‘fifteen, ten years ago’ described by Michael Fallon, when trying to touch up young female researchers, lobby correspondents or political activists was ‘acceptable’, just harmless ‘flirtation’. Some male MPs believe they still live in that era; while one ...”

“... paradise that he invented from scratch. Palmer had been born, in 1805, in leafy Walworth, but when young had moved with his family to Houndsditch, where his father had set up as a bookseller. Houndsditch was dirty and rough; the contrast with Walworth must have been dismaying, and the boy’s unhappiness was subsequently deepened by the death of his mother and ...”

“... work from the start, when she mentions in her prologue the poem ‘The Voice’, which recalls the young writer meeting Emma Gifford, his wife-to-be, at a station in Cornwall. Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then, Standing as when I drew near to the town Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then, Even to the original air-blue ...”

“... Delhi in memory of Indira Gandhi. A little group of us flew out together, Air India, first class: Michael Foot, Jean Floud, William Radice, with Sir Richard Attenborough in pursuit. It was my pleasure to travel with my old friend and newly-minted Dame, Iris Murdoch. I’ve never travelled first before, and well! Cocktails, champagne, caviar, lobster ... ...”

“... legend in Jane Eyre’s first encounter with Mr Rochester, but here the predator’s quarry is a young woman and the episode has erotic overtones: the sound of his horse’s hooves reminds her of the Gytrash, a ‘north-of-England spirit’ from ‘one of Bessie’s tales’. This creature ‘haunted solitary ways, and sometimes came upon belated ...”

“... not previously found within a single volume. It is an insider’s book, in the sense that the young Habermas cut his philosophical teeth on Heidegger – just as the young Derrida and the young Foucault did. But it is also a debunking book, in the sense that it comes out on the side ...”