“... beefy constable administered a spanking. (For all I know, this is one of the many triggers that may have set Paul Johnson off.)Tariq Ali was the moving spirit of that rally and this book – which includes the spanking picture – brings it all back with exquisite vividness. It’s hard to recall what a hate-figure he was in those days. I had a friend, a ...”

“... expansively to be useful. Even to list the things that affect women’s lives disproportionately may be to include too much, given the tendency for those at the bottom of social hierarchies to suffer more from everything, whether famine or plague or economic recession. There are all sorts of problems in the world, and feminists must focus their energies. To ...”

“... extreme actions that would jeopardise national order and harmony. That claim of exceptionalism may seem self-satisfied and insular now, but it rested on an assumption that social peace was hard won and that human sinfulness, as Gladstone put it, was ‘the great fact in the world’.Parliament’s function was not just to block rash policies; it also had a ...”

“... I met some of the leading figures in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement in Taiwan at the end of May, they told me that the bill was just one of several urgent issues. None of them anticipated that a new, spectacular phase of Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy was about to unfold. We met at an international conference commemorating the thirtieth ...”

“... of trench warfare did not shock Rosenberg into poetry or make him see more clearly. The war may have accelerated his poetic development as much as it cramped its production, but it did not fundamentally change its course. Like that of his longer lived contemporary David Jones (born five years after Rosenberg, in 1895), Rosenberg’s writing displays a ...”

“... 1911. Guilty by association with the Holocaust, he poses a special challenge to biographers. They may choose to concentrate on his many contributions to non-eugenic fields as diverse as psychology and meteorology, or to explore the roles he played in the upper echelons of Victorian science, but there’s no escaping the spectre of the Final Solution. Any ...”

“... or she might end up being subjected to harmful treatment for a disease she doesn’t yet have, and may never have. In the UK, screening for breast cancer is carried out by mammogram. The breast is compressed between plates and an X-ray image taken. Contrast in X-ray images varies according to the density of the materials photographed; the denser the ...”

“... an exam, being acquitted of criminal charges, trumped up or valid, receiving medical treatment may all require the bribery of public officials. The kickback plague is endemic, inflating by as much as 50 per cent the cost to the state of everything from weapons to highway construction. That the principal players in ‘the greatest corruption story in human ...”

“... Porter’s poem begins by acknowledging separation, remorse, confusion and affection: In wet May, in the months of change, In a country you wouldn’t visit, strange Dreams pursue me in my sleep, Black creatures of the upper deep – Though you are five months dead, I see You in guilt’s iconography, Dear Wife, lost beast, beleaguered child As the poem ...”

“... who saw matters in such an evolutionary – and thus, he argued, ethnocentric – light. (This may have had something to do with his experiences as a soixante-huitard.) It became increasingly evident to him that such groups deliberately chose to avoid certain institutions, and remained ‘savage’ by preference (it’s here that one sees the ...”

“... want negotiations with the Taliban. A survey of 423 men in Helmand and Kandahar, carried out in May by the International Council on Security and Development, found that 74 per cent were in favour of negotiations. In Kabul in March, I interviewed several women professionals, the people who suffered most from the Taliban’s restrictions on girls’ education ...”

“... fatality rate ranged from 50 per cent to 80 per cent, so as many as one in four townsfolk may have been infected. Women, who tended to the sick, suffered disproportionately, as did the old and the young. Three months before plague struck Stratford, a young woman named Mary gave birth there to a son, William. She and her husband had lost their first ...”

“... forum was kept clean but the stone flooring, which had worn paper-thin, was not replaced. There may still have been rich people living comfortably, and there are signs that some big landowners extended their estates as smaller ones had to sell up, but it didn’t do them much good, once the local markets and the middle-range consumers on whom their ...”

“... profile and monkish tonsure on display. Toulouse-Lautrec and van Dongen followed suit. Fénéon may not have liked it, but it was the more interesting view. In full face he looks as if he might be someone else: in old age he resembled Gide. Whereas the profile shot offered artists much more promising material: a big boney nose, prominent chin and, beneath ...”

“... appropriately poignant quotes from the Iliad. Or so the story goes. Whatever Nero’s popularity may have been among the grass-roots (enough, certainly, to encourage a series of ‘false Neros’ to attempt to reclaim his position in the years that followed), he had sufficiently outraged elite opinion that by 68 almost every Army commander and provincial ...”