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“... explain why there have been so many surprises and unexpected reversals of fortune. The Taliban rose again in 2006 because it hadn’t been beaten as comprehensively as the rest of the world imagined. At the end of 2001 I was able to drive – nervously but safely – from Kabul to Kandahar, but when I tried to make the same journey in 2011 I could go no ...”

“... Tooze shows that in the first year of the war the share of national output going to the military rose by 60 per cent. Hitler resisted pressure from his advisers to prepare for a long war because he believed – correctly – that Germany could not win a long war. Instead, he insisted on the massive expansion of programmes for aircraft production, ammunition ...”

“... different answer. She says that Twilight came to her in ‘a very vivid dream’ on the night of 1 June 2003 (she remembers the date because her kids started swimming lessons the morning after). The dream must have taken place barely two weeks after the last ever episode of Buffy went out on American TV. Here’s how the coven appears to Bella, who has herself ...”

“... new book by the economic historian Ashoka Mody.*The number of Indians who go to sleep hungry rose from 190,000,000 in 2018 to 350,000,000 in 2022, and malnutrition and malnourishment killed more than two-thirds of the children who died under the age of five last year. Meanwhile, Modi’s cronies have flourished. The Economist estimates that the share of ...”

“... and a few years later a fourth was added. The cinema staggered on through Covid, then shut in June 2023, before opening in March this year as the Astoria (part of a small group of cinemas, mainly in former holiday destinations). Its 1970s rival, the Orient, became a bingo hall in 1983, and then a nightclub, but has been empty for more than a decade.Cliff ...”

“... the strategy backfired. Because the military profession was reserved to Mamluks, some of them rose to positions of great power and transcended their original ‘slave’ status, and a Mamluk elite eventually emerged. In 1250 it seized power in Egypt and Syria and established the Mamluk Sultanate, with its capital in Cairo. Later the Ottomans would recycle ...”

“... Her parents had hidden her, the caption to the first picture tells us, with a French family in June 1940; the mother was deported on Convoy 11, 27 July 1942, from Drancy to Auschwitz (13 out of 1000 survived). Ida writes after the Liberation that two gendarmes came to get her at midnight on 30 January 1944. Various neighbours tried to dissuade them; the ...”

“... anything in the 1990s, yet between 2005 and 2008 prices soared: wheat and maize grown in the US rose by about 130 per cent; so did American soya, which goes mostly to animal feed. Dairy prices shot up (butter by 74 per cent, powdered milk by 69 per cent); the price of chicken went up by two-thirds. A month before the banking meltdown in 2008, ‘food ...”

“... site was, on average, barely two metres above sea level, and four metres below the level the Haven rose to during the 2013 storm.I have to dwell for a bit on the weirdness of that last sentence. It has ‘sea level’ both as a constant and as a value that goes up and down all the time. Human life and property by the trillion dollarload hang on the millimetre ...”

“... than any since records began, 250 years ago. It started in late May, with peaks in mid and late June. In Yorkshire and Humberside, the worst affected areas in June, 27,000 homes and businesses were flooded. In low-lying Hull, pumps failed to cope with the deluge, and a man trying to clear a storm drain died of ...”

“... leaving only half a dozen as the protesters’ final defences. Then, early on the morning of 11 June, the police entered Taksim Square, stopping a few metres short of the park. Seven police TOMA vehicles, armoured water cannon, their white paint damaged in previous street clashes, formed a line with riot police units in helmets and shields. The line ...”

“... travelling to Athens and Rhodes for lessons in rhetoric and philosophy. Pompey meanwhile steadily rose to a position of dominance after his victory at Mutina and the murder of Brutus’ father. He overcame the followers of the anti-Sullan general Quintus Sertorius in Spain in 72; helped to crush the slave revolt led by Spartacus in 71; rapidly established ...”

“... party in the pub shook their heads over the technological defeatism of the Americans: the missile rose out of the earth’s atmosphere, steered by four graphite rudders in its slipstream. One hundred kilometres up, it reached the top of an are as neat as the illustration of a parabola in a geometry textbook. You have to pause for a moment, there, as the ...”

“... At 6 a.m. on 12 June 2002, four FBI agents barged into the SoHo loft of Samuel Waksal, the former CEO of the biotech company ImClone Systems Inc, and led him away in handcuffs: he was charged with insider trading. His father and daughter had dumped nearly 175,000 ImClone shares only days before the Food and Drug Administration announced that it had rejected Erbitux, the compay’s cancer drug, leading to a steep price fall ...”

“... chapter and goes on to invoke Algerian independence fighters executed in French jails, the White Rose conspirators Sophie and Hans Scholl, Stalin’s victims at the Moscow trials, the Chinese murdered in Nanjing, the anarchists put to death in Franco’s Spain. These images are intercut with grisly scenes from Greuze and Goya, history and representation ...”