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“... after the massacre, and following some momentary inherited impulse, Kestner entered a church and lay grovelling on the ground, in a ‘hopeless tantrum of hope’ that he might be forgiven for what he had done. Hughes marvellously exposes the evasions and fantasies, the temporary sentimental appeasements that 20th-century people and nations offer their evil ...”

“... remarks on its jacket that ‘everyone who reads it will learn things they didn’t know.’ Most lay reviewers will think this an understatement; yet the scope of the project, its distance from anything that might be described as parochial, may persuade them that the records of Christianity, preserved and interpreted for the most part by assiduous priests ...”

“... George Crosby, the hero of Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel, Tinkers, has been laid out to die on a rented hospital bed in his living-room, surrounded by his wife, children and grandchildren. He is 80, a retired teacher and clock repairer, and is suffering from cancer and renal failure. In the last week of his life he begins to hallucinate about his childhood in rural Maine ...”

“... Italy.Filippo Focardi’s study, published in Italian in 2013 and now translated into English by Paul Barnaby, unpacks these silences and assumptions. Crucial to his analysis are the linked, binary stereotypes of the ‘good Italian’ and the ‘bad German’ which, he argues, have helped to define the way people have understood the Italian experience in ...”

“... he died on impact with the ground. He fell more than 25,000 feet to the desert, where his body lay, still strapped into his ejector seat, until it was recovered the following day. ‘That night will never leave my mind,’ his sister Sabrina said when I met her in Philadelphia. ‘I feel I need to know exactly what happened to John so I can properly ...”

“... not reproduced here, especially those that are analysed in the text. Gyp’s skill and influence lay in the creation of unsubtle, memorable stereotypes, especially of ‘modern’ girls and of Jews. According to Charles Maurras she was, after Edouard Drumont (author of the notorious La France juive),‘the writer who fixed in the minds of French people the ...”

“... comparison with Nicolson. After Coats died in 1990, the diaries passed to Channon’s son, Paul, who died in 2007. Now, with the encouragement of his children, three formidable volumes have appeared, admirably edited by Simon Heffer, with profuse footnotes displaying considerable scholarship and intermittent pedantry.As Heffer says, Channon was seen as ...”

“... The Death of Economics, the second half of which is called ‘Towards the Future of Economics’? Paul Ormerod’s book has already provoked excited reviews from people thrilled to have their prejudices against economists and economic forecasters confirmed by one of the profession, an economic forecaster himself for ten years, who proclaims in his Preface ...”

“... ours rested not so much on military prowess as on economic primacy.’ The last chapters of Paul Kennedy’s epic study suggest that American power is subsiding relative to other powers rather than dying. Vidal sees himself as the literary chronicler of the rise and decline of American power. His latest novel begins as the Spanish-American War of 1898 ...”

“... the allusion to songs about people in concrete flats seemed an unnecessarily explicit rejection of Paul McCartney, whose favoured vein that had sometimes been, in songs like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Penny Lane’. McCartney’s compassionate tableaux and jaunty ballads, to be sure, were usually light and occasionally trite as well, but they were at least ...”

“... even the great Jewish leader Isaac Abravanel failed to understand where the true destiny of Israel lay, leading his followers only as far as Naples. For Netanyahu, the idea of the Jews as a raza was expounded with unprecedented vehemence and on a devastatingly wide scale in 15th-century Spain. The ‘Old Christian’, it might be said, defined him or herself ...”

“... draughtsman (‘he can draw a horse as well as he can ride it’), unsure whether his priorities lay with art or action, and in consequence retaining throughout his life a philistine bias. He lived bohemianly a while in Paris, set up house and career in London, raffishly enjoying a ménage à trois, became an inveterate Chelsea clubman and uncertain ...”

“... they assumed that all age groups were equally likely to become infected and that the difference lay in the way the virus affected different age groups. The prevalence of asymptomatic cases in the wider population was estimated, as it had been in the LSHTM model, by using the data about passengers on the Diamond Princess, but the Imperial team added data ...”

“... three months, while the formula to preserve him was perfected. The chemical soup he eventually lay in – 240 litres of glycerine, 110 kilogrammes of potassium acetate, 150 litres of water and a small amount of quinine chloride – is still used for the baths the former leader of world Communism is given every 18 months to keep him supple. His lips were ...”

“... from the shock of discovering that elsewhere in the world, the time of a train’s departure lay outside her family’s personal control. More typically of mass experience in the 20th century, the movement of troops in two wars and of evacuees in the second clothed the physical discomfort of blacked-out waiting rooms and smutty, unheated trains with ...”