“... another naturally occurring psychedelic, and the alcoholic brew known as chicha, and that they may have countered the nausea that often accompanies San Pedro with movement and song. ‘The architecture of the complex seems to have been designed to frame and create a spectacle in which the senses were manipulated by sound, light and spatial disorientation ...”

“... that prove a connection to a parent or grandparent usually involves talking to relatives who may or may not want to talk to you. It may involve dredging up stories that families would rather keep quiet. And since you’re applying to become a member of a particular nation-state ...”

“... in Britain; today, however, it is a flourishing enterprise in the universities. The difficulty may lie in the fact that the new intellectual history has been so intent on reducing the historical and geographical scope within which ideas may be discussed that it simply cannot make out what Berlin is after. Works in this ...”

“... fumes and other toxic emissions that billowed unchecked across the region during those decades. It may sound reductive, but among the many wonders of this sometimes flawed book is how richly its single-mindedness illuminates its subject, and how forcefully it makes the case that the subject merits serious consideration. Though I’m partial to crime ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Porter’s selection is especially revealing about the extreme sense of discomfort that madness may bring: not just that no one believes what you are seeing or hearing, but even if they did, they would be the wrong people to be talking to in the first place. The great example here is John Perceval, son of the only British prime minister to be ...”

“... newly-elected Labour MP for Leicester, aged 40. Nothing is recorded of what was said. Macdonald may have expressed his enthusiasm at the advance of the Labour Party. He had trebled his vote at Leicester, and the Party now had 29 MPs. He may well have looked forward to the ‘century of the Great Hope’ which so many new ...”

“... angle, much the same picture. Temperamental difficulties, personal rivalries and momentary pique may again have played their part, and the sheer complexity of the policies made them even more arcane. Though the logic of the situation was that Lawson had to go because of the Prime Minister’s intractable hostility to his strategy for monetary integration ...”

“... a touch of this creative restlessness in After Hours with P.G. Wodehouse. Readers of this journal may recall a Diary by Richard Usborne (LRB, 4 October 1984) in which a determined investigation into the origins of Wodehouse’s use of ‘exquisite Tanagra figurine’ led to an evocation of the days when cut-price Boeotian coroplasts cluttered the shops of St ...”

“... Parliament Trust have done less to write the history of Parliament than to prove that its history may be too complex and amorphous to write at all. Ironically perhaps, the fact that several of these familiar reservations apply to the new four-volume The House of Commons, 1386-1421 does not detract at all from its resounding success. In the first place, as ...”

“... the English country gentleman, who is rarely a gambling man, because gambling, however foolish it may be, has a point to it, and the English country gentleman prefers to do things that have no point. The English race as a whole loves the apparently pointless ... The English worship things whose appeal mystifies those who are not English: cups of tea, rain ...”

“... in Western Europe between the wars. Léon Degrelle’s party won 11.5 per cent of the vote in the May 1936 parliamentary elections, and 29 per cent in the rural Francophone province of Luxembourg. His youth and pungent oratory assisted Degrelle in exploiting the growing disillusionment with a stagnant multi-party Parliament: the brooms his followers ...”

“... they are habitually called in Israeli Hebrew), the earlier strata of the language may have become in some ways antiquated but were never made obsolete. A literate speaker of modern Hebrew is probably no farther removed from the language of the Bible than a speaker of modern English is from the language of Shakespeare: the basic vocabulary is ...”