“... we encounter Adam Smith and David Ricardo and the slightly more contemporary figure of Theresa May, whose ambition to make Britain ‘the global leader in free trade’ Hannan quotes approvingly. Free trade is the great elixir. ‘Free trade doesn’t simply put more money into the hands of the lowest earners. It doesn’t just eliminate extreme poverty ...”

“... in the highlands of Papua New Guinea is one of the poorest and most lawless places on earth. On 18 May 2015 ten men armed with machetes, axes and homemade guns entered the village of Fiyawena looking for a woman called Mifila, the mother of two young children. Six months earlier she and three other women had been accused of using witchcraft to cause a measles ...”

“... are often given a simple surface description that distinguishes them from all the others. It may give a clue as to what sort of person they are, and even to the role they will play in the story – rich/poor, handsome/ugly, hero/villain. Genre fiction is unembarrassedly good at this. Raymond Chandler, in The Long Goodbye: ‘Her hair was a lovely shade ...”

“... by hate. People love different things – and can end up hating each other because of it.Justice may not be what love looks like in public, but fandom might be. To be a fan is to renounce fairness or balance, and to open oneself up to joy, despair, triumphalism, indignation and absurdity. In sport, judges are (or are expected to be) dispassionate and ...”

“... had become extinct. He and Petrarch, who was the most influential of the 14th-century humanists, may both have found the same classical precedents for this view, in Columella’s book on agriculture or the younger Pliny’s letters. But Alberti drew on a wider range of classical sources. Christine Smith has argued that Lucretius, whom Petrarch never ...”

“... What​ are the people in our lives really like – inside? Seeming and being may not be the same. Smiles may be false and vows of love insincere. Appearances are deceptive; you can’t tell a book by its cover; beauty is only skin deep. Yet, in ordinary circumstances, surfaces are all we have to go on ...”

“... men. Sturgeon was always willing to address what it meant to be a woman in power. Unlike Theresa May, she railed against the Daily Mail’s ‘Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it!’ headline, and talked about her anxieties over the menopause. She continues to call attention to sexism in her memoir, though occasionally she seems to use it to protect herself ...”

“... In a period of changing governments and political and economic instability Parliament itself may well have welcomed this anchorage, as ministers and policies came and went. Although in 1929 Lord Chief Justice Hewart (who had previously been a member of the Government as Attorney-General) published The New Despotism, fulminating at the impotence of the ...”

“... countries is very ancient. A more recent trend is for names that end in -an or -en. This may be enough to account for the meteoric rise on both sides of the Atlantic of Jayden, coming soon to a playground near you, a lovely sounding name, without history or significance, which first entered the US top 1000 only in 1994. Or perhaps the -en sound has ...”

“... onto the floor, picking through the motley treasures between sips from a mug whose tawny contents may have been cold tea without milk. (S)he: I have no idea whether this compromised pronoun represents sensitivity or the opposite, but it seems the best choice of a bad lot. ‘He’ is reductive in one way, ‘she’ in another, and though ‘(s)he’ seems to ...”

“... the blockaded area,’ the Air Ministry stated, ‘they pass a most uncomfortable time . . . It may be necessary to continue the operations for some months before a particularly stiff-necked tribe gives in, but this requires no particular effort on the part of the air forces.’ Nevertheless, ground forces were often needed as well. It was the Camel Corps ...”

“... areas on pain of losing his god-sent gift. The areas on which neither he nor his characters may touch are defined by the proximity of thought to their surface – thought visible, almost palpable, in nuggets or globules readily picked up by the vulgar. Art in other hands might have been such an area, but James took the risk – after all, it was his own ...”

“... an ambush ten days later. W.T. Cosgrave then succeeded to the leadership. The Civil War ended in May 1923 with the defeat of the Republicans. Three years later de Valera split from the Republicans and formed his own party, Fianna Fail, which entered the Dáil in 1927 and was elected to government in 1932. That the Dáil Government, operating underground ...”

“... In May 1895, the day before Oscar Wilde’s trial began, W.B. Yeats called at Wilde’s mother’s house in London to express his solidarity and that of ‘some of our Dublin literary men’ with the family. He later wrote of ‘the Britisher’s jealousy of art and artists, which is generally dormant but called into activity when the artist has gone outside his field into publicity of an undesirable kind ...”

“... from BL MS Add. 25,707: Calmely as the mornings soft teares shedd Upon some rose or Violet bedd May your slumbers fall upon you All your thoughts sit easy on you Gently rocking heart and eyes With their tuneful Lullabyes There are no firm divisions between objects here, or between objects and non-objects. Tears fall, slumbers fall, thoughts sit, and all ...”