“... conference at Karakorum in eastern Siberia, leaving his trusty general Kedbuka (so called by Runciman, but Keegan prefers the probably more authentic Kitbuga) to complete the conquest of the Middle East. So far so good; and fifty years earlier this would have been child’s play for a Mongol army, preceded as it was by a paralysing legend of ...”

“... of her time at Cambridge that she got her own first ‘dusty answer’. She fell for the dashing David Keswick, who seemed so ‘very, very smitten’ that after one kiss she knew they would be together for ever. She was devastated when he explained he had been engaged to somebody else for years. She renounced love and made a short, disastrous marriage on ...”

“... knowledge evolved. Yet for an indefinite future nothing could be more strikingly predictable – David Runciman would arrive at the same observation in these pages some years later – than the regularity of American elections (LRB, 21 March 2013). So, Furman concluded, though the 21st century would be more unpredictable than the 20th in every other ...”