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“... for either of the main parties to forge decisively ahead. Seventy seats in the new Parliament are held by MPs who are not Labour or Tory. In 1970 that figure was 12. Back then, Northern Irish electoral politics were still an extension of what happened on the mainland: the Ulster Unionists, effectively the Northern Irish branch of the Conservative Party, won ...”

“... growth, it directly contributes to rising inequality. A doctrine emerged in the 1970s which held that corporations should focus on maximising ‘shareholder value’, expressed in the price of shares. Tying managers’ pay to share price encourages them to focus on this, but results in gigantic differences in remuneration within companies. You don’t ...”

“... weight to it should ponder the Conservative defeat in genteel South Edinburgh, a seat they had held since the 19th-century Reform Bills, and the loss of its MP, one of the ministerial architects of the poll tax, Michael Ancram; or the fact that they came within the narrowest shave of losing their Defence Secretary George Younger, in Ayr – by general ...”

“... as we now know by his own peculiar account, took place in his bathroom. Since one of the girls is held to have drowned in the bath, the prosecution saw fit to have this detachable part of the crime scene brought into court, to authenticate a pathologist’s testimony, even though there was nothing remotely unorthodox about Huntley’s bath that might have ...”

“... who wanted me to read verses at a little morning session for foreign poets. ‘Oh, please, Mr David. We only have one Frenchman so far.’ Foolishly I agreed to pipe up if she really ran short of European versifiers. By Easter Sunday we were enjoying an ideal English summer, blue skies and cool breeze. We were feasted, Arab poems were beautifully ...”

“... the expulsion of the Jews by Edward I in 1290. During the next fortnight five meetings were held, the last of them open to the public, before the convention was adjourned. It did not meet again. Menasseh ben Israel, who from his base in Amsterdam had for eight years been mobilising support for the readmission of the Jews to England, was broken by the ...”

“... in the popular iconography of American freedom, alongside comic-book heroes in capes and tights. David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, a federalist president who failed to secure re-election, has sold two million copies since it was published in 2001. For all its sentimental and antiquarian dimensions, the cult of the founders has damaging political ...”

“... the reason novelists and short-story writers are often quite distinct breeds). The American writer David Means will have none of this. His highly original stories are coats that have been reversed to show their linings. Rather than lightly hint at an exquisite pattern or organising symbol, he likes to accentuate the pattern, to dash it in the reader’s ...”

“... transition period. They were belatedly tabled at the summit convened by Bill Clinton at Camp David in July 2000, but Jerusalem was the issue that ultimately led to the failure of the summit and the breakdown of the Oslo peace process. Religious rivalries are notoriously difficult to resolve, and Jerusalem’s spiritual significance for the three great ...”

“... got properly started before it begins to show signs of not going on for ever. So when I read in David Plante’s Difficult Women (1979) that Sonia Orwell in her final years complained to him, ‘I’ve fucked up my life. I’m angry because I’ve fucked up my life,’ it doesn’t seem to me necessarily to imply a particularly tragic or wasted life. At ...”

“... economic benefits to the cash-strapped council, but these depend on something harder to describe. David Harvey calls it ‘collective symbolic capital’, the ‘special marks of distinction that attach to some place, which have a significant drawing power on the flows of capital more generally’. Edinburgh’s USP is a combination of historical fiction and ...”

“... building; the Taliban hadn’t had the funds to build any new schools in the two years they had held power in Kandahar. Women would be allowed to work outside the home once the war was over. Stoning was the punishment for adultery, with the man put into a sack and the woman, in her burqa, placed in a pit up to her waist before the crowd pitched in. It was ...”

“... in what turned out to be his final years he backed away from almost every position he had formerly held, even rewriting his early and most difficult ‘elitist’ compositions to make them more accessible to the ‘masses’. Born in 1936 to a radical, bohemian and impoverished middle-class family in Cornwall, where art and music flourished, Cardew had a ...”

“... rather than La Realidad, misled by assurances that I would find the local leader, Comandante David; I was stranded where not much was happening for the third anniversary of the uprising. But was I the only one who was not ‘in Reality’? After all, the Zapatista movement likes to appear as something of a phantom, expressing itself in concealments and ...”

“... eel-like name), who was ‘large, foreign, frightening and ravenous’, according to the historian David Hanlon. Nahn Samwohl was the evil version of the smaller, friendlier-looking freshwater eels worshipped by Pohnpeians. He lived on one of the islands of Nan Madol in a well, connected to other islands by underwater tunnels. Twice a year, in a ceremony ...”