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“... messianic claims derived in part from the work of the popular Jewish thinker Menasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam. In 1650, Menasseh published The Hope of Israel, outlining the various developments which showed that the world was drawing closer and closer to the messianic age. Menasseh, a rabbi at the Amsterdam ...”

“... is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.’ So wrote Nicole Krauss. Paul Auster ranked the book with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina: ‘wrenching, beautiful, unforgettable’. Grossman’s American publisher called it ‘one of the very greatest novels I shall have the privilege of publishing … When critics look back at the ...”

“... had more impact had it been published at the time it was written. The assessments of, for example, Paul Wolfowitz – identified by Greenstock as a key influence on the decision to go to war – and the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, would have attracted more comment when these figures were more ...”

“... paramilitary organisation which held that Irish Protestants were descended from the lost tribes of Israel, and that the coronation stone at Westminster came from Tara, Co. Meath, and had once been Jacob’s pillow. Mains and Semple were sexually greedy and indiscriminately attacked their charges, but McGrath was in a class of his own. He could carry out up to ...”

“... and calibre.One says all this about the bewildering richness of Wagner’s legacy with an eye on Paul Lawrence Rose’s Wagner: Race and Revolution, a book whose single-minded – albeit forceful and historically well-informed – account of the Wagner phenomenon renders the man and his operas pretty much as violent, revolutionary antisemitism. Reading ...”

“... with a troubled childhood, now in early middle age, wondering what the point of it all is. But Paul O’Rourke has one redeeming feature: he’s a dentist. Which means that rather than pondering the mysteries of the universe and his place in it while staring into space, he instead thinks about the meaning of life, or more often the lack of it, as he’s ...”

“... know what their moment is. Missing it would seem unfair, since they care about things – Kosovo, Israel, Goya, Hegel, who’s publishing in the New American and Debate – and this rarefied sort of caring was unusual even at the good universities they went to. Gessen’s portrait of his generation is a study of ambition, but its point is not to dazzle us ...”

“... the nephew of the until recently omnipresent Ahmad Chalabi, was handpicked by the US envoy, Paul Bremer, to direct the production. A quick cut-and-paste job provided a statute for the tribunal; a slate of safely anti-Saddam judges was rubber-stamped by Bremer’s Iraqi Governing Council. And after the council had been hastily transformed into a ...”

“... cold-hearted, conflicted and calculating man. The shock produced is akin to the revelations about Paul de Man or Philip Larkin. Lee Siegel is horrified by the racism in Shadows, by the ‘crude, alienated caricatures’ of blacks, gentiles and vulgar Miami Jews who ‘make Goodbye, Columbus look like “World of Our Fathers” ’. According to Hadda, the ...”

“... than the Canadians of the 1970s. Rebecca, the only survivor of a family of Jewish sisters, went to Israel. Prema, once an anti-Nazi saboteur, went to Australia but returned to Czechoslovakia in 1968 (just missing Smiricky on his way out) and wrote to him from their hometown, giving the news (mostly bad) about their old friends, and ...”

“... or actually enhances a country’s security is doubtful. After all, despite the success of Mossad, Israel still lives in a perpetual state of fear and terrorism. But the intelligence game is now an international affair where winning and point-scoring is the most important thing.   No one dares ask whether any of it is worthwhile or could be done far more ...”

“... with 380 images in colour and black and white. The essays range from Ancient Greece, Rome and Israel to Medieval and modern Europe; from the civilisations of China and Japan to those of Melanesia and the Aztecs. The bibliography, compiled by Barbara Duden, leaves no doubt as to the vast quantity of published work bearing directly on the social ...”

“... aged thirty. It was the custom/to marry daughters within the family.’ But then on her arrival in Israel, where people ‘even more Oriental’ than Balkan Jews like her were modernised, this tender, almost mute woman is remarried to Albert Danon, the protagonist. The English reader, however, cannot tell that in terms of ...”

“... meticulously referenced genealogical tables of biblical characters culminating in Jesus Christ and Paul of Tarsus, to convince the good folk of Jacobean England that the Twelve Tribes of Israel and the notables of the Old Testament were gentry families rather like those who ruled the shires of England in 1611 – or better ...”

“... She was no separatist, however, and acknowledged how much she owed to the men who helped her: Paul Hamlyn, Michael Holroyd, Sonny Mehta, Christopher MacLehose, Bob Gavron. 1980s-90s. When Carmen moved to Chatto as their managing director in 1982 she lavished care on her authors: Iris Murdoch, Hilary Mantel, Hermione Lee and other Bloomsbury biographers ...”