“... become ‘things’: the attempt to remove a terminological distinction between men and women may turn both into an object, as when ‘chairman’ and ‘chairwoman’ are replaced by ‘chair’. Such phenomena are part of the rough-and-tumble of linguistic change and a fair price to pay for legitimate social objectives. My concern is not with the fact ...”

“... regaining ‘the right to manage’. In writing The Enemies Within MacGregor has been assisted by Robert Tyler, late of the tabloid press, but my guess is that the strange mixture of Zane Grey Western and Harvard Business School management-speak which MacGregor’s ghost employs in place of English prose accurately reflects his employer’s mode of ...”

“... certainly isn’t the kind of remark Oedipus was ever allowed to make: previous tragic characters may have spoken of funerals, but they didn’t mention the cost of the catering or implicitly liken their remarried mothers to a meat dish inappropriately served twice. In Ivano-Frankivsk, as elsewhere when this play is done well, Hamlet’s line achieved a ...”

“... case, a technical prerequisite. You need an A-bomb to ignite an H-bomb, and the lab’s Director Robert Oppenheimer reasonably enough felt that the race to forestall the Nazis required no distractions from the main lines of development. Destructive friction between fusion and fission was reduced by giving Teller what was essentially a roaming brief, and it ...”

“... cannot put the book down. But sometimes you find yourself turning to a far less agile writer – a May or a Macartney on the Habsburgs, an Otto Pflanze on Bismarck – to understand the context, and to appreciate what Taylor achieved in simplifying it all. Taylor’s two books on the world wars are astonishing feats of clarity and compression. He himself ...”

“... intended to harm Palestinian civil society’. In December the American political scientist Robert Pape described it as ‘one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history’.What strategic bombing does to a city is to produce, by military means, something similar to the massive urban destruction of last year’s earthquakes in Turkey ...”

“... saviour and leader, yet refused to reduce the size of his army. In 1817, the British officer Robert Wilson pointed out that Russia’s population had grown from 22 million to at least 42 million since 1762. In 1828, de Lacy Evans estimated that Russia’s population was 50 million and would reach 73 million in another fifteen years. Since the ...”

“... of the Scottish Parliament, Labour’s number of seats has dropped in every single election. In May it won just 17 out of 129, tied with Reform in a distant second place after the SNP, which has 58 seats and is about to enter its third decade in government. A chunk of Harris’s old Glasgow constituency is now represented in Edinburgh by Holly Bruce of the ...”

“... so forth – and Geertz quickly became embroiled in a bitter losing battle to recruit his friend Robert Bellah, a sociologist of religion, which erupted into the gleefully malicious pages of several national newspapers. (Geertz quotes a ‘particularly enragé mathematician’ telling the director Carl Kaysen that ‘social science will be your ...”

“... since is only marginally connected to the sexual adventures of top Tories. The word ‘sleaze’ may be new, but the concept is not. British political history this century, from Rufus Isaacs to Horatio Bottomley to Maundy Gregory to John Poulson, is littered with great corruption stories. The explanation for the increase in sleaze under Thatcher and Major is ...”

“... blew up as they were fishing at Cuan à Bhòcan, the Sea of the Ghosts, south of Barra Head, on May Day 1897. Highland folk know very well that many of their forebears left their homelands by choice. So why had Chrissie said that her forebear Mary Ann MacNeill (née MacCormick) was ‘cleared’? Those last islands had been drawing me for most of my ...”

“... four children, on 6 January 1916, three months before the Easter Rebellion, in which her father, Robert Brennan, served as a commandant in the Irish Volunteers. Following the surrender ordered by Pearse, he was sentenced first to death and then to penal servitude for life but was released soon after and went on to organise the Department of External Affairs ...”

“... the killing of millions of ‘natives’, and of course slavery. Belgian rule in the Congo may have come to an end in 1960 but that doesn’t mean the effects of Belgian rule have also ended; and Belgian historians have only just begun to take account of what the country did in Africa. There seems to be no end to the aftermath of empire in the lives of ...”

“... Lacks. Click. The American Congressional Record. In Memory of Henrietta Lacks – Hon. Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr (Extension of Remarks – 4 June 1997) Henrietta Lacks was born in 1920 in Clover, Virginia. At the age of 23 she moved to Turner’s Station, near Baltimore, Maryland, joining her husband David. She had five children, four of whom ...”

“... bricks and be called home by its inhabitants. At least for a while. The buildings in America may be on the move, but it’s nothing compared to the lack of fixity of the people. Even houses that are built in situ, in towns and suburbs, have, no matter what the diversity of architectural style, an air of slightly rackety impermanence, as if their original ...”