“... or far too much. His now hackneyed and rather inferior quip – ‘When I am dead, I hope it may be said:/”His sins were scarlet but his books were read”’ – prompts the thought that if he had committed any scarlet sins they would have been made public long ago. His elderly infatuation with Lady Juliet Duff, subject of many epigrams, was probably ...”

“... Deployment that provides a ready attack option is part of this process. But, however much he may be deplored, it is up to the Iraqis to remove any ruler who abuses them. ‘Pre-emptive defence of world order’ looks a little thin as an explanation for the deployment of so many of our overstretched Armed Forces. Should we look for an explanation from the ...”

“... club which, if the ‘Left Behind’ series continues to sell at its present rate, he may one day be eligible to join) and was its first president. It is a secretive organisation, made up of some five hundred invited members, including former Senators (Jesse Helms), Congressmen (Tom DeLay), figureheads of the radical Right (among them, Larry ...”

“... If the war goes badly, it might well destroy Blair’s authority for ever. A delayed victory may prove as fatal as a defeat. Massive casualties in the Gulf – on either side – and even a few deaths at home are likely to be considered by the electorate as too high a price to pay for recklessly putting ideas about a new world community into ...”

“... calumniated. Such was the state of Christian feeling at the beginning of the present century; we may at least hope that nothing of the kind now prevails.’ The hope was vain. When Darwin’s biography was printed it lacked all but the most rudimentary expressions of Enlightened doctrine. Now Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men, a collective biography of Erasmus ...”

“... windows, it seemed the very emblem of despair, a tunnel to nowhere. Before my first admission, in May 1988, I had never been inside a mental hospital. So my distress, waking that first morning to find myself incarcerated in this preposterously sinister setting, was considerable. Friends who came to visit me – having first walked the length of the corridor ...”

“... Most of the inhabitants were certainly Slavs, and many were Polish speakers, but a majority may have been Czechs or Wends. There were also quite a few Jews, who at this time seem to have coexisted more or less happily with their Christian neighbours. In 1327, Vretslav was inherited by the Bohemian Crown, becoming definitively part of the Holy Roman ...”

“... but the waist size of the corset was not to alter, ‘in order that the original waist measure may be retained’. The practice of footbinding springs to mind. Mothers who rejected this advice and were sorry later could always put their adolescent daughter into the Redresseur, a grim-looking article which laced both front and back and not only compressed ...”

“... the crematorium on order from the firm of J.A. Topf and Sons. Hitler was not present at Wannsee, may not even have known about it. But as Kershaw shows, he did not need to be there. He sanctioned every step of the descent into genocide; his talk was heavy with references to ‘extermination’ and ‘annihilation’, and he could tell SS leaders to come up ...”

“... On a May night in 1936, I saw that mightiest of zeppelins, the Hindenburg, floating above the skyscrapers of New York – a leviathan nearly as long as the Titanic, and as ill-starred. If Dr Goebbels had had his way the Hindenburg would have been called the ‘Hitler’ and would have borne an enormous swastika on its side, but Hugo Eckener, the man who gave substance to the dream of Count Zeppelin, was tough enough to face down the Nazi spin doctor when honour demanded ...”

“... of modernity for Egan, does not to my mind fit the situation of concentration camp inmates, which may be better characterised as an intolerable stasis. Given her ambitions, it is not surprising that the quality of insight and argument varies. But her eclecticism is courageous, her specific analyses and elucidations vigorous and vivid, and her theoretical ...”

“... the giants celebrated ad nauseam in Jurassic Park and Walking with Dinosaurs. Hard though it may seem to associate avian elegance with cumbersome and ferocious behemoths this was the story told by the cladograms, revealed by interpreting the bones of the famous old bird Archaeopteryx unfettered by preconceived notions. That theory has been triumphantly ...”

“... of bees’, large amounts of honey and many, many stains – a preponderance of goo. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but the words fit the subject: you get the feeling that the writing wouldn’t be very different in another language, while wondering whether his next book might not be less good for being better written. ‘Islands’, the first ...”

“... figures as Abraham Geiger, Nachman Krochmal and Joseph Perl. The historian must select, but one may legitimately query the principles of selection that lead to such omissions. The policy seems all the more strange given the publishers’ claim that the book portrays the Jews as more than ‘mere objects of the history and intentions of others’. A random ...”

“... and sexual betrayal could have unfolded just as easily in South-East Asia (or New Jersey). There may be no way for a contemporary author to permit himself to try to write fully from within another culture, but if it is ethically impossible to negotiate the antithetical traps of writing from abroad as either coloniser or tourist, that is a fascinating problem ...”