“... Tatar leaders were quick to plead allegiance to Russia: ‘We Muslims, from young to old, must be sincerely devoted to the tsar and the fatherland and not hesitate to give life, or blood, if it were demanded from us for their protection,’ the tsar’s Crimean mufti declared. Not all Tatars obeyed: some saw the war as an opportunity for liberation from ...”

“... has happened,’ Ní Chuilleanáin wonders in ‘Witness’, to which the immediate answer might be that no one has in fact asked.Ní Chuilleanáin’s narrative poems are tales of ‘life with the lid on’, to echo Elizabeth Bowen. Her protagonists are typically nameless: a woman on her way to join a convent, a swineherd, a group of traveller women cooking ...”

“... beautiful of all the palaces and the inspiration for Donnafugata in The Leopard, was destroyed by an earthquake in 1968: the courtyards are full of ruined masonry, the garden which was once ‘a paradise of parched scents’ is overgrown by thistles seven feet tall. The ducal palace at Palma di Montechiaro stands gaunt ...”

“... relief maps, reptile skin, leaves. These big black fields command attention and respect simply by virtue of their grand materiality – Serra thinks that blackness is ‘a property, not a quality’. That insistent materiality encompasses not only surface, but also shape and scale and position. Serra knows that a triangle has less ‘weight’, less ...”

“... the planking. How long I’d been down and out was anybody’s guess; I’d guess an hour or more by the state of my suit, a foul rag-bag, by the state of my hair, a patty-cake, of my own ripe keck, unless it was the keck of Sandy Traill or Blind Harry, my friends in drink that night, that aye night, every night, in ...”

“... But the BBC, influential and plural, is perhaps the most representative. A corporation financed by the only tax the government raises but can’t spend, a large-scale employer with a public service remit, a reporter and creator of fashion and culture, a purveyor of news, information, education and entertainment operating at the cutting edge of technological ...”

“... year’s election and he needed one of his most contentious and least popular ministers to be less visible. Still, he discussed it with Gove beforehand – selling it as an opportunity to put ‘all that passion and antagonism’ to better use – and he thought he had his friend’s agreement. Then, out of the blue, ‘Michael emailed to say he had ...”

“... poem, novel, film, play, painting, opera or ballet for longer than two paragraphs, and readers can be forgiven for feeling a bit disoriented as they travel to the chapter’s next destination. Hall gives just one page to Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, where W.B. Stanford, in The Ulysses Theme (1954), which Hall cites on her first ...”

“... are as remote as ever. Nineteenth-century democrats knew that having an election every year would be clumsy and time-consuming (the US House of Representatives, which does it every two years, is proof of that). But they thought the alternatives were probably worse. Without regular elections politicians would drift into self-serving cliques that pursued their ...”

“... and often strenuously. He sleeps out, on mountains and moors. He walks arduously, along coasts and by holloways. He has spent months in our wild places from Sutherland and the Outer Hebrides to the extremities of Wales. He visits them, rather than living in them. He goes out of a strong feeling for nature, as a professional observer and writer – one who ...”

“... 07’ was the pithy slogan). But once in power, the party discovered it couldn’t bear to be in the same room as him. His disdain for his colleagues, his paranoia, his monomania and his disloyalty proved too much: there was a coup and he was ousted. Then, having dumped him, the party found it needed him back, partly because he was its one proven ...”

“... do they look like? Like a brown and purple cloud-shadow spread out across the uplands, described by William Atkins in characteristically fine focus when he says of the North Yorkshire moors that ‘the new blooms were silverish specks; they were pale grey, beige and mint green. I picked a sprig, but the moor-purple visible from a distance was not a colour ...”

“... This election year​ will be remembered as the one in which two candidates rallied the indignation of millions against the establishment. Both Trump and Sanders actually call it that. The reflexive response of the establishment – proof of its existence, if you needed proof – has been its uniform portrayal of the two ...”

“... called out in alarm: a swift had crashed to the ground just outside the back door, struck down by a sparrowhawk: it gave one gasp and died, and I buried it at the end of the garden. Encounters with birds have enriched my life, whether it was the golden eagle spiralling silently upwards a few yards below me in a corrie of Beinn Alligin in Torridon, or a ...”

“... out to fit pretty well with the outcome their models might have predicted. It was always going to be hard for an insider to succeed at the end of a two-term Democratic administration. The Electoral College gave certain in-built advantages to a Republican who was able to pick up votes in the right places. The state of the economy – neither hot nor cold but ...”