“... than he could at home.Outside the John Garang mausoleum, a vast empty lot surrounded by a tall iron fence with gilded spikes, I suddenly find myself swallowed up in a swarming crowd. All along the fence, thousands of people are patiently waiting in line. In the street, among policemen and soldiers wearing brightly coloured camouflage, a group of men in ...”

“... May, ‘an eclectic blend of ulysses, kilroy, icarus, neptune, ishmael, noah, jonah, columbus, and richard halliburton! So you must, in all kindness, emphasise your mortal finitude when next we meet!’ He had leave in June, and it is through Gordon’s faithful eyes that we see Plath on the cover of the first volume of the letters: blonde hair, red lipstick ...”

“... back in England increasingly infuriated by their distinctly unvalorous and self-indulgent monarch, Richard II. King Henry IV proved a more convincing ruler than Richard, and his time on the Reysen helped excuse his murderous usurpation back home. The Teutonic Knights’ enterprise took three centuries to collapse under the ...”

“... William Sancroft, who acceded to her request for charity and put her in touch with the publisher Richard Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the ...”

“... now captured by the Teflon-coated fabric of the Dome, was once the Execution Dock. The gallows and iron cage moved here from Wapping, when the sensibilities of that district, much closer to civilisation, were elevated by the mansions of marine speculators and the better class of sea captain. Executions and bloated bodies washed over by three tides were less of ...”

“... at least until Peaky Blinders came along? In my experience, nobody, not even Oswald Mosley or Richard Nixon, was capable of radiating such unease in company. Harold Macmillan couldn’t stand having Powell opposite him in cabinet looking ‘like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes’. So he relocated Enoch way down the table where he ...”

“... set within a shopping mall, Grand Central, which blurs into another shopping mall, the Bull Ring. Richard Vinen, writing the first serious history of Birmingham in a long while, is aware of how hard it is to pin the city down, to explain what it is or what it is for. Planners in the 1960s, he says, ‘were sometimes perplexed as to why Birmingham had been ...”

“... be drawn into the newly vacant centre of the image: anything from the fluted pillars and wrought-iron gates of some nearby Classical architecture to the futuristic technology of the working environment. Keen to escape the predictable routines of business appearance, these photographs certainly don’t withdraw into a romantic focus on personal character. It ...”

“... voluntarily accept ‘Jewish colonisation’: it had either to stop or to proceed ‘behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach’. But there were other paradoxes. He said that he had no wish to oppress the Arabs, still less to ‘transfer’ or expel them, and he may have meant it. And yet not only did he insist that a Jewish majority ...”

“... the like); synthetically coloured with such chemicals as ‘Prussian blue’ (a ferrocyanide dye), iron sulphate and red lead; and improved by the addition of dried sheep shit. In the 1830s, more than a million pounds of fake ‘British leaf tea’ – a fraction of the fraudulent stuff then on the market – was burned at the Excise Office Yard off Broad ...”

“... the election). They share the view that politics combines the invisible hand of the market and the iron fist of the state. This belief was manifested in Macron’s first two major decisions: the abolition of the solidarity tax on wealth (ISF) and the enactment of new anti-terrorism legislation. A wealth tax was introduced in 1982 after the victory of the left ...”

“... primitives that would take decades to modernise. When Hoxha, who would rule the country with an iron fist for forty years, visited the Kremlin in 1949, Stalin advised his zealous comrade not to be too hasty in collectivising agriculture, and to think twice about liquidating the merchant bourgeoisie – those people could be useful – only to be told that ...”

“... YOU CAN SEE THE END OF THE WORLD FROM HERE. The text refers to the American Liberty ship, SS Richard Montgomery, wrecked off the Nore sandbank with 1400 tonnes of explosives on board. They say that if the Montgomery goes up, the detonation will take out Sheerness. The three masts of the deadly ship are clearly visible and marked with a warning ...”

“... hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.’ This is the wording of Richard Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit ...”

“... kind of clothing that will make you look poverty stricken.’ She wrote about meeting the actor Richard Pryor, who in the course of their interviewbought a gold necklace … for the woman he had introduced as his girlfriend … a gold ring for his manager and a gold ring for his valet … wrote a cheque for sixteen hundred dollars to his jeweller ...”