“... radar, the B-2 also operated undetected by the American people, who were oblivious to when bombers took off, where they went, or what they did. The new American way of war did not require the participation or even the active support of Americans, merely their acquiescence. This was by design: excluding the people increased the latitude exercised by officials ...”

“... the gap between the well-to-do and the rest of us widened, credit became easier to get and people took on a staggering amount of debt, putting themselves in the position of being one paycheck away from financial ruin. ‘When your bank says No, we say Yes,’ one mortgage company used to say. Even if one had a decent salary, once in debt to a bank, a credit ...”

“... a photograph of his parents, Nina and Semyon, seated across a restaurant table from whoever took the picture (presumably Shteyngart). Nina – the book is dedicated to his analyst, so let’s look first at his mother – has a coquettish tilt of the head, cropped hair and a tight-lipped, sly smile. She sits in front of an empty plate and a glass of ...”

“... has a lovely founding legend. In 1899 Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo’s Imperial University took leave from his post as professor of chemistry to study in Leipzig, where the best researchers could be found. He found other things in Germany too. They included cheese, tomatoes, asparagus and meat. For 1200 years meat had been banned in Japan – and, try ...”

“... out of it. From the 1860s to 1880s, a period of policy-driven famines on the subcontinent, he took on the monumental task of using the colonial state’s own statistics, published in its annual reports on Moral and Material Progress, to prove the ‘drain theory’ of British rule in India, challenging official claims of imperial benevolence and making a ...”

“... was a hallmark of the drifter, those who set out on an intentional journey by the new method took to carrying a suitcase instead. The term ‘automobile panhandling’ was used for a while before it was replaced in the 1920s by ‘hitchhiking’. The origins of the word are disputed. It may have built on ‘auto-hiker’, hobo slang for this new type of ...”

“... from further manuscript study, and, as his irrepressible desire to communicate with his readers took charge, his reflections on a variety of topics engendered by the momentous doings of his day. The edition of the Annotationes by Anne Reeve, of which the present volume on the gospels is the first of a projected three, is thus of great importance for our ...”

“... seas’. On 1 March 1990 two Unionists, Dr Christopher McGimpsey and his brother Michael, took a case to the Supreme Court in Dublin, claiming that the Anglo-Irish Agreement, signed on 15 November 1985 by Mrs Thatcher and the Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald, is unconstitutional; that is, in breach of the 1937 Constitution. Thatcher and Fitzgerald solemnly ...”

“... has narrowed its meaning since Shakespeare wrote the Bastard’s great speech about it in King John, where it meant greed, self-interest, the opening bars of capitalism. Adshead’s book belongs to a recently growing genus of works on the history of particular commodities. To be of most value a study of this kind should be a part of general history, joined ...”

“... and skill at organising forced them into the public consciousness. From 1954, when the NAACP took Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education to the Supreme Court and won its judgment that state education could not be ‘equal’ if it was also ‘separate’, through a decade of Martin Luther King’s non-violent marches, boycotts and sit-ins against ...”

“... and drifted into the writing of guidebooks for the expanding railway age. His first publisher was John Murray the third, who wanted an anonymous Handbook on Berks, Bucks and Oxfordshire and insisted on facts, not fancies. Hare regretfully accepted this limitation. Much of his early travelling was done with Maria, by now a prey to hysterical trances. When he ...”

“... just before Christmas 1966, Orton met ‘an ugly Scotsman who said he liked being fucked. He took me somewhere in his car and I fucked him up against a wall.’ An ordinary participant, an ugly Scotsman perhaps, might have stopped there, or discussed his feelings. Orton concludes: ‘the sleeve of my rainmac is covered with white-wash from the wall. It ...”

“... was relieved, peasants like Perrin Bordebure moved into deserted villages such as La Cicogne, took them over, raised families, and bred the population back to its earlier and ‘natural’ mark around twenty million. The period 1450-1550 was accordingly one of growth and relative ease for the peasant classes. By 1550 this was over, and France had moved ...”

“... first time that a substantial body of what might be called war writing was produced by women. It took the form mostly of novels and journalism. Another contrast with 1914-18 was that this was to be a war more of prose than poetry. Feigel might have made more effort to develop some of these themes. As it is, despite its considerable incidental interest, her ...”

“... sources where previously the documentation stopped in the 19th century. The present editor, John Simpson, explains that in some cases ‘quotations formerly published in the Dictionary have been silently omitted.’ This could be construed as censorship or ‘deletion’, but plainly it is being done in the interests of balance. No dictionary can be ...”