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“... literary theorist Paul de Man. But what about the ordinary people of the Low Countries? Hugo Claus’s The Sorrow of Belgium, a novel first published in Holland in 1983, presents a world in which collaboration with the Nazis is made to seem as inevitable as breathing. The protagonist, Louis Seynaeve, who is ten years old at the time of ...”

“... self-preoccupied gesturing and accesses of information-sharing: As in the spring of 1961 Elly and Hugo Claus and I Smoked as we watched The people of the town of Skopje Stroll back and forth across their fountained square, Safe in their murmur on our balcony, One dusk, not long before an earthquake tipped Themselves and their society aside. It’s a ...”

“... Trinity (Moss). He goes on to fight the forces of evil, chief among them a certain Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), who is endowed with irresistible menace, and in the process undergoes apotheosis, emerging finally as ‘the One’, to nobody’s very great surprise. All of which is of course guaranteed to please the crowds. The style, stunts and special ...”

“... Hugo Hamilton was born in 1953 to an Irish father and a German mother. When he was growing up, as he writes in this remarkable memoir, he spent a lot of time trying to prove that he wasn’t a Nazi. But he never could. The sight of somebody in lederhosen and an Aran sweater was irresistible to the local bullies. Later, his peers at the prestigious Coláiste Mhuire were just as intolerant ...”

“... slogans, she writes that ‘Fidel, with his white goatee, was now nothing but a Santa Claus without a sack of gifts.’ But she never quite renounces them. ‘This Négritude that I so contested in the past now seems to me to be the last magnificent dream for our humanity,’ she said in 2009, ‘a political dream where the barriers between our ...”

“... to my brother Alexander. Bear with me. Roy’s wife, Valerie, was godmother to my younger brother, Hugo (technically, he is my half-brother), and Valerie and Roy’s eldest son, another Alexander, was Donald’s godson. Two families roped together in friendship and event. Alexander, who is now sixty, lives quite close to me in London, but I haven’t seen much ...”

“... be a substitute for empire, and that was sufficient; likewise his colleagues. As the journalist Hugo Young put it, ‘the deep, existential meaning, for Britain, of getting into “Europe” was not considered.’ No serious thought was given to the implications of accession. In his judgment, ‘ministers did not lie, but they avoided telling the full ...”