“... plan was agreed even so, and war broke out on 29 November 1947. By the time Arab armies invaded in May 1948, around a thousand had died on each side and some 300,000 Palestinians had fled or been expelled. In July 1948 the Israeli army attacked the Palestinian village of Lydda, located between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Soldiers threw hand grenades into ...”

“... former secrets find their way into public archives, and the Freedom of Information Act may secure access to others.The vast Manhattan Project, which designed and built the Bomb, was a very great secret. The Axis enemies weren’t supposed to know, but when Hiroshima was obliterated the biggest secret was out, which was that such a thing was ...”

“... whole, prescient and generous) ‘Letter to the Nation’ last year; it happens to contain what may be the largest petroleum reserves in the world. This is the scene into which Yeltsin flicked his match on 26 August, threatening new frontiers. It would be wrong to attribute any deep-lying Russian chauvinism to him. He has used national sentiment to dislodge ...”

“... wise to you and your little ways now and I’ll put a stop to them. Do you hear me? You may be fooling everyone but you’re not fooling me.’ Dry eyes wide open, Faten stared at him. He shook her. ‘Why are you staring at me?’ he screamed. ‘Have you never seen me before? Or is it because you know I’ve found out about you, Miss ...”

“... about the traps and delusions created by this habit of thinking. Such ineptitudes, he writes, ‘may well prompt misgivings about the people who write them’, but they don’t undermine the central hypothesis of feminist criticism: ‘that gender is a crucial determinant in the production, circulation and consumption of literary discourse.’ Clearly it is ...”

“... surely that of William Strang, the Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, in a paper of May 1943: We need Russian collaboration. The conclusion of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty marks our decision that this must be our policy … even if fears that Russia lay a ‘heavy hand’ on eastern, central and south-eastern Europe are realised … I should not ...”

“... for Night Train in 1997 and has stayed there since. Night Train has a female narrator, though that may not have been enough to reverse the gender imbalance in Amis’s readership. In interviews promoting The Pregnant Widow (2010) he went so far as to describe himself as a ‘gynocrat’, someone who would welcome the rule of women. This apparent submission ...”

“... he foresees his own ‘demonic possession’ by the craze for ‘novelistic prose’. Of course it may simply be that Pushkin admired Scott and genuinely disliked Kotzebue. And it is true that Hoogenboom’s claim for The Captain’s Daughter – that it is not, as usually thought, influenced by Scott’s Heart of Midlothian and Rob Roy, but drew on Cottin’s ...”

“... publication, already feel like artefacts of a moribund social liberalism. Reparations for slavery may have seemed ‘the indispensable tool against white supremacy’ when Obama was in power. It is hard to see how this tool can be deployed against Trump. The documentation in Coates’s essays is consistently impressive, especially in his writing about mass ...”

“... Most of tonight’s television schedules, it appears, are given over to the Hitler franchise. He may have lost the war, but he’s walking away with the ratings. Two and a half hours of Hitler in Colour, followed by Uncle Adolf (a ‘fact-based’ drama focusing on the Führer’s clammy relationship with his niece Geli Raubal). BBC2 is offering The Nazis: A ...”

“... of amendments, among which is to be found both the right to strike and ‘a guarantee that workers may freely elect their own professional representing bodies, independent of the party and the state’. In September 1976, in response to the continuing severe repression of workers who had taken part in the June strikes, a group of some dozen intellectuals ...”

“... with the proprietor and chat with other customers, or run into a friend or neighbour. That may happen in big chains such as Starbucks – but the employees aren’t likely to be around for long, the profit doesn’t go back into the community and the design of the place is generic, not reflecting its environment.The San Francisco of my youth was full ...”

“... taking this one seriously. The book’s title has an archaic resonance, but also suggests we may be in for an elevated form of spiritual self-help. The main discussion is highly selective in a highly predictable way, focusing on ten or eleven poets from a 200-year historical span, all of them dead white men and long-canonised monsters of fame (Wordsworth ...”

“... solitary or out of synch with everyone else, I held onto this private aloofness very fiercely. I may have envied friends whose language was one or the other, or who had lived in the same place all their lives, or who had done well in accepted ways, or who truly belonged, but I do not recall ever thinking that any of that was possible for me. It wasn’t that ...”

“... cruelty, insanity and crime; from their lopsided faces, sloping brows and misshapen features may be recognised the unmistakable criminal type.’But this sort of rhetoric had to be put into cold storage after the dénouement of the Palmer raids. Hoover now spoke the language of liberal reform; asked, on becoming FBI Director in 1924, for the Bureau to be ...”