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“... Mendoza has transformed the corruption, chaos and constant bloodletting of Mexico’s disastrous War on Drugs into blackly comic fiction. He is best known for a series set in his home town of Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, heartland of Mexico’s most powerful cartel. Silver Bullets, the first instalment, came out in Spanish in 2008, followed by La ...”

“... seven years later. The reverberations from those events reached a long way: as far as the Cold War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy (maybe), Watergate and, every four years to this day, the American presidential election. It is a story that reminds us of the bond – political, cultural, economic, sentimental – between the United States and Cuba, a ...”

“... doubt, but not the man who did more single-handedly to save the world from the danger of nuclear war than anyone. And who, single-handed, ensured that the transition in the USSR and the Soviet empire did not end in a bloodbath, as it did in Yugoslavia. This year I was luckier. The World Political Forum (President: M.S. Gorbachev) sent an invitation from ...”

“... burnt flesh of his child. Till Achilles is as mortal as he.’ To preserve him from the coming war with Troy, Thetis disguises her teenage son as a girl and hides him among the women at the Court of King Lycomedes on the island of Skiros. Deidamia, the princess, sees through the disguise and seduces him. Eventually Odysseus, Nestor and Ajax come looking ...”

“... behind an unusual tripartite screen. Circling the city stood isolated funerary towers – upper-class family tombs several storeys high, built in the early years of the city’s prosperity but in use throughout its history. They could each hold hundreds of bodies in individual niches racked up in side passages off the central corridors on each floor, all ...”

“... in Western historiography: the multigenerational contention over the causes of the First World War. This began before the war itself, as the statesmen chiefly involved in starting it forged arguments exonerating themselves and inculpating their adversaries, arguments that would later resonate in the works of ...”

“... presents himself as an outspoken advocate of two unlikely political causes: the Falklands War and its conduct (‘the direction in which the bows of an enemy warship happen to be pointing at the moment of encounter cannot justify letting it go’) and capital punishment, which he would ‘be quite happy to see extended to the perpetrators of any ...”

“... however, who doesn’t really like to be seen thinking at all. It’s more chic (or more upper-class) just to drift from one thing (or one bloke) to another, and to represent one’s life as a sequence of anecdotes. Someone suggested she get a life settlement out of Sidney: ‘Feckless like my parents, I was not cut out for that sort of thing. The future ...”

“... of this book, he lays out his own Livingstonian anthropology. These wandering bands did not know war, as the inhabitants of the nuclear-free zone of Lewisham shall not know war. They were ‘a very together, well-organised and sophisticated proto-culture’. Everything that we are today has emerged from the hunter-gatherer ...”

“... history of the second half of the 18th century. David McCullough’s 1776: America and Britain at War is designed both to cash in on the cult of the founding era and to act as a mild corrective to its excesses and misrepresentations. To be fair to McCullough, the book’s subtitle sits somewhat uneasily with a thesis that emphasises internal divisions within ...”

“... after their lives were reduced to rubble by Hurricane Katrina.) None of them can be called working class, but the words immigrant, minority and ordinary are regularly applied by themselves and their party to prove that social background and gender have not hampered them in their climb (hard work and determination is all you need) to cabinet office, so what are ...”

“... North Caucasus, but almost none from Central Asia. This shouldn’t be a surprise. During the Cold War some Kremlinologists claimed that the region was more prone to dissent and rebellion because its Muslim population was inherently anti-communist. The US and other Western governments expanded their broadcasts to Central Asia during the Soviet occupation of ...”

“... no longer feel at ease in each other’s company. The story of one family from al-Khudat, a middle-class Sunni neighbourhood in west Baghdad, explains why the city is going to remain divided. The victims in this case were Shia, but what happened to them, and how they reacted to it, is typical of refugee families elsewhere in Iraq. The family had lived in ...”

“... with which Beckett had some acquaintance in real life, when towards the end of the Second World War in Nazi-occupied France, he and his wife scrabbled about for a few carrots or onions along with the rest of the half-starved population. The tramps of Waiting for Godot (though who says they are tramps?) are similarly reduced to hoarding the odd ...”

“... Plato thought the ideal state would have a population of just 5040: ‘numbers enough for war and peace, and for all contracts and dealings’. Aristotle believed large states to be ‘almost incapable of constitutional government’, and that large populations carried the risk of foreigners blending in and acquiring the rights of citizens. The ...”