“... cultural barbarity of German Fascism with an extensive, decisive and clearly visible gesture. In May 1933, when ‘un-German’ books were being burned, Heinrich Mann’s were on the bonfire. Thomas Mann’s were not. He was still being protected by Bertram, among others. But his main protection was his own silence. In September the first issue of Die ...”

“... in the treaty port of Tianjin, unsuccessful study in Japan, then political baptism in the May Fourth protests of 1919 led to four years spent in Europe. He was admitted to the University of Edinburgh but declined to take up his place, and on moving to London quickly decided that Paris was preferable as a base. In France he became a communist and began ...”

“... might appear. If it cannot be allowed simply to drop out of the picture, it is partly because we may find ourselves throwing out personal identity along with it. The self, after all, is an obvious candidate to be the phantasmal thing that remains consistent through the variable accidents of our experience, providing them with a medium in which they can ...”

“... longer invest so much in mere association – it has at least been put in its place. John McCain may be launching ugly spots with increasingly crude and mendacious claims about his opponent; Barack Obama’s media teams will certainly spotlight their man’s high cheekbones and trim good looks, even when he’s talking up his tax plans. But cheerful ...”

“... pakeha too have been dealt a treacherous hand: ‘A New Zealander has some reason to know what it may be like to belong to a people which thought it had a history and is now instructed by others that it has none.’ In 1973, the United Kingdom acceded to the European Common Market, and – without much of a thank you for support in two world wars and much ...”

“... is over? I am wondering not just how he is, but where. I begin to suspect he has gone so far he may never come back. When I phone the unit that claims to expect him, they can tell me nothing. Must be still in theatre, they say; but it’s clear they don’t care, it isn’t their responsibility. Have they just mislaid him? That seems possible. They take my ...”

“... himself on the Italian front in 1918; and Rudi, the third son, poisoned himself in Berlin on what may have been the second anniversary of Hans’s death. ‘Karl was blamed for loading his sons with excessive career pressure,’ Waugh writes, ‘for insisting that none of them should pursue any profession that didn’t involve the two disciplines that had ...”

“... of heretics (which he was), a man perhaps unhealthily obsessed by his daughter Meg (which he may have been), and someone who makes cruelly unfunny jokes about his second wife, Dame Alice (which he did). He is not much else (although he was). Here Mantel’s revisionary eye seems cruel, or to have missed something. Her Wolsey has an instinctive ability to ...”

“... enterprise in which Hitler and his coterie of chieftains invested much effort and imagination. It may have been one of the cleverest things they ...”

“... a civic duty. There is evidence that Miller’s ultra-moral stance in opposition to this obscenity may have destroyed his own career. I don’t mean that he didn’t get work, but that his righteousness was dangerous to him artistically as well as politically, ironing out his ambivalences. What can a public man go on to do once he has confirmed his goodness ...”

“... for Fabergé pieces didn’t endear them to the average citizen in pre-Revolutionary Russia, and may have contributed to the family’s murder. It’s hard not to see the Fabergé eggs as a metaphor for the Romanov family, that final, ostentatious flourish of European aristocracy: beautiful, hugely costly, useless, even silly. The Fabergé eggs were the end ...”

“... tyranny, that they need it to sustain and explain their lives. Worse, she fears that they may have created the tyranny they now submit to: ‘He’d simply walked by naked. They were the ones who had dressed him. Because they themselves needed power but were afraid of exercising it. They preferred to give it to a poor passerby who was dumbfounded when ...”

“... the conventional wisdom has it that you show up early on voting day: the lines at the booth may be longer, but the chances are that no one else will yet have voted in your name. And trouble, if it comes, comes in the afternoon. On 10 April, I joined the women’s line outside the voting booth at Sano Gauchar, in Baneshwor. Conversation mainly had to do ...”

“... in the second half of the 20th century, of Britain’s manufacturing industry. The universities may have played some part in this decline; but a greater part was played by Britain’s business culture. It is a curiosity of this document – and of the attitudes of successive British governments – that the relationship between business and the universities ...”

“... austere, elegant, ‘moreish’ – that are not stably referential at all but which may do descriptive work if people know the liquids to which such words are routinely applied and can, by extension, form an idea of how an as yet untasted wine might be similar. But this wasn’t a game Saintsbury was much interested in playing. Connoisseur that ...”