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“... For the sake of a single verse,’ the famous passage from Rilke runs, one must see many cities, men and things . . . One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings . . . And still it is not yet enough to have memories . . . Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them ...”

“... his hirelings in the Congo Free State fed his appetites and their own, is certainly one of them. Adam Hochschild has taken most of the material for his new book from published sources; but about that I have no inclination to complain. Far from it. The findings of specialist historians have constantly to be ‘translated’ for the benefit of general ...”

“... in tragedy and a viciously disputed memory and made little difference to the war’s outcome. Adam Hochschild, in Spain in Our Hearts, suggests that the foreign journalists covering the war were so obsessed with the military struggle and the Republican leadership in Madrid that they hardly noticed the revolution going on outside their hotels. And yet ...”

“... role in Lumumba’s fall and death. This narrowness of focus is very necessary and welcome. As Adam Hochschild found when he came to write King Leopold’s Ghost,* the obduracy and arrogance of the Belgian establishment about their country’s behaviour in Africa are unique in post-colonial Europe. They apologise for nothing. To them, and they hope ...”

“... In his book King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild describes the stretch of the Congo River as it approaches the sea: Much of the Congo River basin, we now know, lies on a plateau in the African interior. From the western rim of this plateau, nearly a thousand feet high, the river descends to sea level in a mere 220 miles ...”

“... of things.In American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, Adam Hochschild argues that the Palmer Raids, in which thousands of immigrants were arrested, should ‘really be called the Hoover raids’ – they were Hoover’s doing, but he shrewdly let his boss take the credit and, later, the opprobrium.* In ...”

“... feeds on an estrangement from and fear of white rural America. As the sociologist Arlie Hochschild has pointed out, red and blue states increasingly represent two distinct economies, and the gap between them has only grown. White men living in Republican counties earn less and have higher death rates than white men in Democratic counties. Poor rural ...”