“... battles when a crisis hits. But the country’s pivotal strategic position has also been a major reason for the rapid escalation of conflict over the past few months: tragically for its inhabitants, Ukraine has become the centre of an intensifying contest between Russia and the West. What do the outside powers want? For the US and Europe, the aim has ...”

“... Britain in the era of anti-Fascism. Broda’s protagonists do not belong in the shadowy world of John le Carré’s intelligence professionals or agents, or even the milieu of full-time Communist Party or Comintern functionaries, let alone the Party cadres trained into total identification with Moscow in institutions like the Lenin School. Their life was ...”

“... or more precisely of the difference between two moments: the summer of 1915, when the novel by John Buchan on which it’s based began to appear in serial form, in the middle of one world war; and the summer of 1935, when the odds on the imminent outbreak of another were shortening by the day. The film takes from the novel its title, the name of the ...”

“... in storage and taps (on occasion) the emails and internet activity of the customers of nine major companies including Google, Apple and Microsoft. The major difference from the Cheney machinery seems to be that general warrants are now dealt out, rather than no warrants at all, but general warrants don’t meet the ...”

“... their first confrontation and defeated the Islamists in Konna. But on the night of 16 January, a major gas production site at the Algerian-Libyan border, near In Amenas, was taken over by al-Mulathameen (‘the masked brigade’), an Islamist katiba (or ‘fighting unit’) based in Mali which had decided to make a response, and perhaps to signal to rival ...”

“... bequest, he could have exploited the resources of the exhibition for far longer than he did. By John Snell’s bequest of 1677, 12 exhibitions were endowed for students from Scotland to study at Balliol for periods of private study lasting up to 11 years, with the requirement that exhibitions be given to Scots who would take holy orders in the Church of ...”

“... West and the rest came in the second quarter of the 19th century. It was only at this point that major disparities emerged between the sites of Western and Asiatic ‘industrious revolutions’. Nineteenth-century Western traders spurned the once popular artisan products of Asia and the Middle East in favour of agricultural produce; while indigenous ...”

“... DM2.95 which, within two years, was inflicting great damage on the economy. Yet politically, the Major government was bound hand and foot to its existing policy – and Labour’s only criticism was that the policy did not go far enough. That was the position at the time of the general election in April 1992, at which ...”

“... within range of Soviet counter-strikes while the US was not, and Britain in particular harboured major US bases. This anxiety remained central for British policy-makers even once the Soviets had got the bomb, as they still lacked the means to use it against the US. On the one hand, this situation sent British governments chasing the chimera of civilian ...”

“... meantime, Gaskell has been transformed from a charming woman who wrote wry nostalgic sketches to a major figure in Victorian studies. Raymond Williams jump-started this re-evaluation in 1958, when he described her first novel, Mary Barton, as ‘the most moving response in literature to the industrial suffering of the 1840s’. Although Williams went on to ...”

“... ask for the death penalty in his closing address – which can only mean that the police boss, Major General Van den Bergh, did not want him to. Maharaj suggests that De Wet, while making up his mind, had sniffed the political wind and on that basis decided against asking for the death penalty. This seems unlikely: the political wind was, after all, full ...”

“... biology institute in Cambridge, but Rockefeller turned the proposal down in favour of a major investment in biochemistry, which presaged the later triumphs of molecular genetics. By now, many of the group’s members had been drafted into war work. Needham was posted to China, where he began the work on the history of Chinese science for which he is ...”

“... about these broken hearts and dashed hopes, but if so the evidence seems to have vanished.A major source for Stourton is Clark’s letters to Janet Stone, wife of the wood engraver Lawrence Stone, kept under embargo in the Bodleian but available to Stourton in the form of transcripts made before they were consigned to the library. Clark’s true ...”

“... this technique into his most significant creation, the Daily Mail. In 2012, the journalist John Rentoul produced a satirical essay on the art of the newspaper headline called Questions to Which the Answer Is ‘No!’ It was a homage to Harmsworth, the Mail and their many imitators. Harmsworth had a lifelong thirst for curious facts. On a world tour ...”

“... it does at the end of history rather than at the beginning. This brings us to Runciman’s third major theme, which is how the confrontation between Hobbesian/Roman and Gierkean/German ideas worked itself out in the theories of the English Pluralists. F.W. Maitland’s dislike of the Hobbesian model may well have antedated his acquaintance with Gierke ...”