“... is held in by his colleague in The Verificationist. (It’s implied that Eldridge, like Bernhard, may have ejaculated under his clothes while on top of his nephew.) Now that The Emerald Light in the Air has appeared, The Afterlife seems to be a hinge in Antrim’s career. The story collection spans 16 years, and across its seven stories a trajectory of style ...”

“... think that the Jews are stronger and want to harm them,’ Orbán told an Israeli newspaper in May 2013. ‘They have no intention of harming us. I explain to people that it is prohibited for us to see Jews as a danger; instead we must see them as the gift of God.’ Márton Gyöngyösi depicted with a Hitler moustache at a protest against his demand ...”

“... sale of this great necessity to private and foreign owners who are beholden to shareholders. Locke may have wanted proper compensation for the labour required in providing water, but he might also ask why privatised water suppliers routinely seek to impose higher price rises than the publicly owned ones, then post millions in profit. Or why some water ...”

“... of his brother-in-law Murat, still king of Naples, were knocked out by the Austrians in early May. There were no other European powers left to enrol in a counter-coalition. In the end the shortcomings of Marshal Ney as a tactician made no difference. If Wellington was right, the balance in the field might have been tilted by exceptionally good ...”

“... with success – the city of Danzig with its mixed population of Germans and Poles. Mandates may have been a cynical move by the European victors to seize the spoils of war from their enemies but they introduced the novel notion that colonial possessions must be administered for the sake of their inhabitants. The League’s related agencies – the ...”

“... its publication and it was allotted an official publication code. It was quickly pirated – it may have sold tens of thousands in pirate editions – then translated into standard Tibetan, and into Chinese for publication in Taiwan in 2011. In his preface, Naktsang describes it as the ‘unvarnished evidence of a young child – what he saw, what he ...”

“... matches form and content’; the Evening Standard’s reviewer feared that she ‘may not read a better book all year’ and the Independent won’t ‘be surprised to see this new novel on shortlists in 2011’. Equally, her second non-fiction book, Remind Me Who I Am, Again (1998), about her mother’s dementia, won the Mind Book of the Year ...”

“... stoppage’, congestion, stomach cramps and ‘irritated nerves’. Of the 1275 days between 14 May 1875 and the end of November 1878, Bismarck spent 772 either on his estates or at spas. Yet the real cost of his rule, Steinberg suggests, was borne by German political culture itself. Bismarck bullied his colleagues and subordinates (indeed, he found the two ...”

“... and leave a note declaring that life outside the Party was unthinkable (as some had done): this may have looked like devotion to the Party, but in reality it just showed a lack of courage, an unwillingness to fight for a reversal of the decision. The rhetoric was harsher when the suicide was a prominent member of the opposition whose death seemed intended ...”

“... present. In its slow unfolding and the inequality of its social effects, March’s triple disaster may bear more resemblance to a premodern famine than to the earthquake-tsunami that destroyed the capital in 1855. No one ever welcomed a famine because of its potential for enabling renewal. The drawn-out disaster gradually exposed and exacerbated class and ...”

“... and the corollary ideal of the Self-Made Man.’ Labor’s bland subtitle, ‘An American Life’, may be meant as a riposte to previous biographers. ‘The greatest story Jack London ever wrote,’ Alfred Kazin said in On Native Grounds, ‘was the story he lived.’ But his afterlife has been uneven. Irving Stone was the first to tackle it, in Sailor on ...”

“... cage can give and more: she/he/it can be a human friend, a dream lover come to life with whom one may do as one wants – in every form of engagement, from tender care to sadistic self-pleasuring. A doll will not bite, will not let rip with her tongue. Rilke describes this ideal complicity in ‘On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel’, an impassioned and ...”

“... that had just begun. Schlögel denies that the Terror contains its own narrative resolution: it may be possible to say what caused 1937, but it’s much harder to say what it brought into being. The bewildering fact is that it would soon be swamped in the national consciousness by a cataclysm whose death toll was perhaps ten times as high. Anything ...”

“... But then almost the same might have been said of Mosul and Tikrit, where the insurgents may have had popular support but were always outnumbered and outgunned. Before they collapsed – four or five divisions have still not been re-formed – the Iraqi security services counted 350,000 soldiers and 650,000 police. They were opposed by an estimated ...”

“... mention Forster’s last great love, Bob Buckingham, a policeman he met in 1930, whose wife, May, not only agreed to share her husband but ended up nursing her rival on his deathbed (Forster died at the Buckinghams’ house in Coventry in 1970). Arctic Summer is largely concerned with dramatising the long gestation of A Passage to India, and it’s fair ...”