“... an elaborately composed alternative, a dish of sliced fruits, before all of them, grandmothers to young children, sang ‘Happy Birthday’ in Asháninka. The woman who led me around the dance on our arrival now held out her hand. Each member of our party was guided, still road-dazed and masato-dizzy, to a stall of native crafts: bracelets, necklaces, bright ...”

“... to the survival of the British nation,’ he declared, ‘than an understanding among its young of our shared heritage and the nature of the struggles, foreign and domestic, which have secured our freedoms.’ We cannot be surprised that some within the next generation do not value our parliamentary democracy if they know nothing of the English Civil ...”

“... Aweek​ before Christmas in 2010, a young woman called Joanna Yeates disappeared from her home in Bristol. I remember first hearing about it on the car radio, my attention snagged, as it always is when Bristol is on the news, because that’s where I went to school. The fact that Bristol is a big place has never prevented me thinking I know it well, but it was when the reporter mentioned Clifton that I was reeled in ...”

“... the reader’s sympathy into places it might not otherwise be led, as in this passage where a young West Indian describes the trials of early marriage and parenthood: we walkin out good till de firss baby come: bonnet pram bootie wettin de bed: evry body stannin rounn cooin like woo-dove: look how e favour e faddah they sayin: look e lil booee eye an e ...”

“... though it has more noticeably gone up than down. The broad outline of his story is well-known. The young Archer shines in athletics at Oxford, gets into the papers as an ebullient fund-raiser for charities (though questions are raised about his percentage of the take), and then enters Tory politics as the late Greater London Council’s youngest-ever ...”

“... to a separate moral failing by which the happiness of women is undermined: love (or loving too young and too thoughtlessly), leasing (or lying) and jealousy. In fact the last two novellas form one connected story, which has been divided to make the book look like a sequel to Hogg’s earlier extraordinary romance, The Three Perils of Man. The ...”

“... wave of militancy among agricultural workers erupted into a harvest-time strike at Rudston Farm. David Holtby could afford the wage increases: it was the Saturday half-day that he couldn’t stomach. Baffled and defeated, he threw in his hand and sold the farm. Winifred came back from the war to find her parents living in wealthy suburban Cottingham, on the ...”

“... crisis in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, especially when the Carolingian heir was too young to lead an army, some of these magnates (Ralph of Burgundy, Hugh Capet’s great-uncle Odo and his grandfather Robert I) were elected king. When the direct line of Carolingians came to an end with the death of the ...”

“... genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by ...”

“... Scowcroft, James Baker) rather than from the Democrats or the Left? Samantha Power and David Halberstam did not set out to solve this riddle, but they have unintentionally provided an important part of the answer. Power was motivated to study the history of disappointing US responses to genocide by her indignation at the Clinton Administration’s ...”

“... owned up to the habit, ‘although women’s bedrooms are surely warmer now than in Chris’s young day.’ ‘Maybe using a word such as voyeurism is unkind’ – it isn’t – ‘but there is an element of titillation … Chris is regularly seized on by her (male) creator and displayed to the male gaze.’The first and most famous time Chris takes her ...”

“... persist). Defra believes it’s time to arrest the decline of farming capacity. It wants more young people to consider farming as a livelihood and landowners to lease to people who’d like to grow food. Four months before the election campaign, Hilary Benn announced a modest £50 million funding top-up for food and farming R&D over the next five ...”

“... lecturer; another, ignoring us completely as they all do, sits working by himself and could be a young broker in the City. Their history teacher talks about them quietly and the problems she and they have, particularly non-attendance, and it all seems a long way from the sixth form that I’ve written. 1 March. In the accounts I have seen of Sir Andrew ...”

“... to Israel’s occupation – in effect criminalising all Palestinian political activity. Young Palestinians in Jerusalem feel they have been abandoned. Many of them loathe the political leadership in Ramallah, which they feel stood by as Israel slowly transformed and took over the city’s east, cutting it off from the rest of the West Bank. The ...”

“... insider when Cameron and Johnson were first seen as rivals for the leadership. ‘Boris thinks David’s a lightweight, and David thinks Boris is a loose cannon,’ said my source. ‘And the trouble is – they’re both right.’ Now Johnson, Fox and David Davis, another whose career ...”