“... Rafah would have to start walking to school at 3 a.m. in order to have any hope of getting to class on time – and to leave by 4 p.m. to be home by midnight. Ambulances were routinely held up at checkpoints. Since 2000, more than eighty Palestinians have died because they were not allowed through. According to the UN Population Fund, 56 Palestinian ...”

“... policemen, mailmen, shoe salesmen and streetcar conductors still recovering from the Second World War; and their wives, who make do, limited by the meagreness of their possible ambitions. Familiar worries run through her work: the troubles of drink, marriage, children, family and – involved in all of these – sentiment and sentimentality; the ease with ...”

“... Katherine lies wincing upstairs and Kate grits her teeth against the pain of breast-feeding. The war zone may be only a suburban American house, but the family is stuck ‘in the trenches’, focused on surviving each new crisis yet ‘always losing ground’. Kate – the former globetrotter – grapples with nipple guards as her partner retreats to the ...”

“... is not without resonance today. Just as Bush used the 9/11 attacks as a pretext for a global ‘war on terror’ and violations of civil liberties, so Putin has responded to terrorist acts (terakty, a post-Soviet neologism) by stifling ‘the forward progress of reform’, or even reversing it. Guchkov himself could not resist the temptation to try to ...”

“... marks, along with much else, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the end of the American Civil War, and the inauguration of photography’s increasingly public role in the world. At war’s end Daguerre had been dead for 14 years. And Talbot had long since decided against renewing his patent on the talbotype (or more ...”

“... survived in the British Empire into the 1830s and in the United States until the end of the Civil War in 1865. (This perhaps explains why Americans all but ignored the anniversary of their own country’s outlawing of the trade on 1 January 1808.) Also lost, of late, according to Marcus Rediker, has been the human experience of slavery. Historical debate has ...”

“... begins: ‘In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her.’ The young man, Saeed, is a dutiful son who lives with his parents. The young woman, Nadia, is strong and independent, and has cut ties with her family. She is ‘always clad from the ...”

“... portrait,’ James once said. His reaction to Sargent’s portrait was to declare it a ‘first-class, living, resembling, enduring thing’. The Reform portrait is not great, but that’s what makes it a living picture in another way – there’s a polite boredom about James’s expression, his apparent lack of interest perhaps a way to mask himself. The ...”

“... the Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995, and on, after the Hamas attack in 2023, to the annihilationist war in Gaza and a rise in settler crimes on the West Bank. The future of the Palestinians, like the future of their tormentors, looks bleaker now than it did when the book was published.There are several British players in his chapter on events during the ...”

“... with the suffragettes and ending with images of protests in London and Edinburgh against the Iraq War. Although the events depicted are familiar territory for an exhibition concerned with social history – the Great Depression, postwar immigration, Greenham Common, the miners’ strike – McQueen foregrounds the photographic image itself as a site 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 ...”