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“... granite tombstone in the Ohlsdorf Cemetery in Hamburg, an Elysium of the burgher dead: ‘Walter Laqueur MD’ is inscribed in Jugendstil characters, the same lettering in which ‘Dr Laqueur’ appears on the plaque that was once outside his radiology office and is now on my gate in Berkeley. There were also two pictures ...”

“... mountain accent – she should simply answer ‘yes.’ Beckley and Bluefield abounded with Toni Laqueur malapropisms; but she fitted in. My father was clueless. He somehow translated my high school graduation as Abitur, an occasion for much ceremony and for a punch bowl of champagne and alcohol-soaked fruit. This did not go down well with my high school ...”

“... The Facts of Life is symptomatic of the tensions to be found in its sources: it is an elusive book, offering vistas of liberation and oppression. In all but their barest outline the facts of life are not really facts, and ‘sexual knowledge’ does not, by and large, come to be known; while ‘creation’ is so protean a notion here as to encompass everything from 18th-century advice on married love, to 19th-century soirées where women told men about their sexual lives, to 20th-century anti-venereal disease campaigns ...”

“... In June 2001, John Dower, a historian of Japan, wrote a comment piece in the New York Times about the blockbuster movie Pearl Harbor. The problem with it, he thought, was not its predictable romantic digressions or historical errors but its moral obtuseness. Like earlier films on the subject, it was ‘a paean to patriotic ardour and an imagined American innocence … sanitised to an attractive level of virtual violence ...”

“... of us, he insists, is a ‘messy business’. Contrary to what Sir William Osler or Dr Lewis Thomas might lead us to believe, death is ‘glutted with mental suffering and physical distress’. There was, he claims, ‘a nice Victorian reticence in denying the probability of a miserable prelude to mortality’ and he will disabuse us of our ...”

“... far from what would in Britain be called ‘Victorian’. Not surprising, perhaps, given how much Thomas Carlyle took from German literature and philosophy; how important Goethe was for George Eliot; how much Matthew Arnold admired German education. It is also telling how compatible a veneration for Kultur was with the Victorian values of service and civic ...”

“... of rape of a white woman, and many more on the excuse of some supposed contact with one. ‘Thomas Miles, Sr … lynched in Shreveport, Louisiana for allegedly writing a note to a white woman’; ‘David Walker, his wife and five children lynched in Hickman, Kentucky, in 1908 after Mr Walker was accused of using inappropriate language with a white ...”

“... Melamed, who died well before his grandson’s – our author’s – birth, has something of the Thomas Hardy character about him: ‘existlessness’ is his lot. He survives in a picture, a travel document, an address book, a case for a pair of glasses and the glasses themselves, through which Jacobson sees the world as blurred and vertiginous. ‘So this ...”

“... reverse the cultural elision that existed in the long shadow of the Statute of Merton. The case of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings is exemplary but not singular. DNA evidence – blood – played a central role (an instance of the political instrumentality of genealogical methods) but it followed on a claim about the foundational principles that determined ...”

“... really turn to the church? At moments like this I wanted to demand that he be more like his hero Thomas Browne. (Kalanithi is buried with a copy of Religio Medici.) The great attraction of Browne’s text is that it – like Montaigne’s Essays – reveals worlds within the writer himself. ‘There are many pieces in this one Fabricke of Man,’ Browne said ...”

“... We understand explicitly, as Nietzsche remarked in the Genealogy of Morals, what earlier generations felt in their bones: ‘Only that which does not cease to hurt remains in memory.’ Remembering and mourning demand that the past is somehow kept present; they demand recollection as the pain of immediate loss diminishes. And yet we – that is, we moderns – are also acutely aware of just how utterly past the past is, how historical it is, how even the worst horrors lose their sting ...”

“... I should say at the outset that I know István Rév; that I have walked with him through the cemeteries of Budapest and have seen in his company some of the graves he writes about. He is a remarkable man, the product of a culture and a time in which one either drowned or saved oneself through erudition, wit, irony and an unremitting conversation with history ...”

“... As Lévi-Strauss might have said, ‘the dead are good to think with.’ But the thoughts they give rise to are seldom as reassuring as one might hope. The dead, and memories of the dead, as both these books suggest, are disruptive, unruly and unpredictable. In his erudite study, Avner Ben-Amos has three cracks at analysing the way French society from the Revolution to the present has tried to come to terms with its most illustrious bodies ...”

“... Fifty years ago, Barbara Tuchman’s bestseller The Guns of August taught a generation of Americans about the origins of the First World War: the war, she wrote, was unnecessary, meaningless and stupid, begun by overwhelmed, misguided and occasionally mendacious statesmen and diplomats who stumbled into a catastrophe whose horrors they couldn’t begin to imagine – ‘home before the leaves fall,’ they thought ...”

“... cent died within weeks. Typhus raged among the 53,000 liberated at Bergen-Belsen. My cousin Renata Laqueur, who was liberated while on a train headed perhaps to Theresienstadt, survived the louse-borne disease; her sister did not (Wachsmann quotes several times from her diary). The liberators, in short, found unspeakable human misery but in those early months ...”