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“... and fire (the Germans had refused them guns), but the bulk of the work was done by local men. Jan Gross cannot reconstruct what happened that day from contemporary records, because there are none. The Germans, not long arrived in the town, permitted the action, but they neither participated nor interfered, and it appears only glancingly in their ...”

“... of 1941. In July 1941, Poles in Jedwabne murdered Jews in a day-long pogrom, as we know from Jan Gross’s book Neighbours, published in 2001. Since then, Polish researchers have located 23 other towns where Poles massacred Jews. Ignoring this research and citing no sources, Davies claims that ‘the number of reports about massacres with a similar ...”

“... another hour. So the people went into the street, and reform turned into collapse. Here Kotkin and Gross have an interesting analysis. Kotkin is contemptuous of theories which argue that ‘civil society’ asserted itself. There was no civil society in those nations, he claims – with the significant exception of Poland. (There, since 1980, the opposition ...”

“... Germany, the Soviet Union, and the postwar Soviet-style regimes in Eastern Europe. The sociologist Jan Gross developed the ingenious theory that denunciations constituted a form of ‘privatisation’ of the totalitarian state, since they enabled individuals to draw on the state’s coercive power to settle private grievances. When we think of ...”

“... grotto. All symphonicall to my Genius, regaling my cloud-born, my Nubigenous Genius, Black clouds, gross & mineral fumes vomited out of a Cupella; Aeriall nitre, black lists, Clouds heaped in cliffs, dreadfull & vast; and winds, violent & furious so as to Rock the Turret until I could not write, and with the candle dancing & waving hardly see, whilst the ...”

“... shows in a painting of around 1700: when still furred and feathered as they are here, or in Jan Weenix’s study of a hound and game, dead creatures trigger a tactile appetite – how would it feel to stroke the fur? – rather than a culinary one. The single detail I found in a painting in the collection that would turn the stomach of those who share ...”

“... Ledeen, editor of the Washington Quarterly Review (of the Georgetown Institute) with General Jan Sejna of Czechoslovakia, who defected to the United States in 1968. The General said nothing publicly on the subject of terrorism at the time of his defection. In 1980, when he was interviewed by Ledeen, he was recalling, with the help of notes, events that ...”

“... to that governing masculinity in contemporary Andalusia. There are some fascinating vignettes. Jan Bremmer reveals that an Athenian male who swayed his hips when he walked, or looked over his shoulder, or inclined his head to one side, was quite likely to be classified as a passive homosexual. Fritz Graf finds Quintilian in Rumpole of the Bailey ...”

“... of Hamsun which, as she sees it, continues to this day. Included in her indictment are Jan Troell’s 1996 biopic of his later years, Hamsun, with Max von Sydow playing the elderly author, on the whole sympathetically; Ingar Sletten Kolloen’s first, two-volume version of his biography (2003-4) which has now appeared, abridged and translated, as ...”

“... pattern blue or peach or an elusive pigeon grey, or the dark, textured gold of old vellum, as in Jan van Goyen’s Winter Landscape with Skaters or Hendrick Avercamp’s Scene on the Ice Near a Town, but no matter how bright or dark the heavens, how empty or crowded the ice, what was important was the new space these pictures revealed. That space, I ...”

“... his essays – is more fatalistic than angry: for Jakobson, Russia has always been a society too gross to support such fine geniuses as Mayakovsky. Rather than dwell on the poet’s fate, Jakobson turns to the characterisation of his poetry. Jakobson remained in Prague until the Nazis came, teaching, writing and, along with ...”

“... and John Murray, on doctors and their proper self-protection, mention ‘consumption’. And John Gross, in a finely judged and moving essay on ‘Intimations of Mortality’, offers a grim humane reminder that some, still, of the uses of euphemism (pace Enright’s cry, ‘Come back, euphemism, all is forgiven!’) are unforgivable: ‘No one can read very ...”

“... implicitly downgrades the feelings and experiences of a minority group. In ‘Aids: Keywords’, Jan Zita Grover runs through a lexicon of Aids vocabulary after the manner of Raymond Williams, angrily expounding the ways in which PLWA (people living with Aids) are linguistically punished by the rest of the community. Her approach is determinedly ...”

“... is no ordinary world. ‘There are times when history is let off the leash,’ the Polish academic Jan Kott remembered one of his teachers saying of the war years. Wachsmann understands this. No criminal operation has left as much evidence, great mountains of it, as the concentration camps. Wachsmann has consulted 45 archives and thousands of other ...”

“... potent small poems, the Dutch 17th-century genre-painting of a tavern, at once radiant and very gross, which he called ‘The Card-Players’. The Larkin poem possesses a rich calm moral abstraction that works against and yet through its earthy image of what happens when, in the company of ‘Jan van Hogspeuw’ and ...”