“... believe that what you’re watching really happened until the relentless inhumanity is interrupted by an occasional human moment. At one point a gunman walks down a row of kneeling young men with their hands tied behind them. He aims a pistol at the back of each man’s head, fires, watches the body slump forward in a pool of blood, moves on to the next in ...”

“... the banner the Oaklanders brought, she told me, because she and her co-organisers had tried to be careful about messaging. But the words FUCK OFF GOOGLE in giant letters on a purple sheet held up in front of a blockaded Google bus gladdened the hearts of other San Franciscans. That morning – it was Tuesday, 21 January – about fifty locals were also ...”

“... and so on to their offices. Paley’s version of the design argument took organic adaptation to be decisive evidence for the existence of a benevolent overseer. British biologists have often portrayed Darwin as having refuted the conclusion of the argument from design, without challenging its premises. Nature may be well ...”

“... By spring​ 1919, Robert Graves was a demobilised war veteran, a new father and the author of four volumes of poetry. At this moment came ‘the first poem I wrote as myself’, as his autobiography describes ‘Rocky Acres’. After surviving years of front-line bombardment, a shell splinter through his right lung and the postwar influenza epidemic, Graves had returned to his cottage in the Welsh hills ...”

“... offer a corrective, for me a significant one, to a popular myth about the Western Front, sustained by several bestselling modern novelists: that it prompted among intelligent people a uniform generational response, a revulsion of the kind reflected in the writings of Siegfried Sassoon and Erich Maria Remarque. In truth, attitudes varied as widely as do ...”

“... of information legislation to try to find out who authorised it and why. ‘I am surrounded by five security guards all the time,’ she told a reporter from Reuters. ‘Often my relatives or I have to cook for them, my sister-in-law has to make their beds. This is a bit annoying … It gets really chaotic when I have to travel, because I use public ...”

“... Glover lived in Shelby, a small town 45 miles from Charlotte – were dramatically affected by the internet, whose potential to connect everyone, wherever they were, to everyone else, reconfigured the relationship between the centre and the periphery. Glover’s distribution network, suddenly, was potentially limitless. He began passing the digital ...”

“... activity to thinking about how we can win.’ Spain goes to the polls on 20 December in what will be a historic election. Since the 1980s, general elections in Spain have been two-way races between the conservative Partido Popular (the People’s Party, or PP) and the centre-left Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, or ...”

“... liar (please quote)’, and, she suspected, ‘on the bottle again’. Still, Schiff can’t be faulted for underscoring the difficulty of capturing a stable image of his subject, a difficulty that’s continued to cling to her work since her death, at 88, in 2006. Spark’s novels – she wrote 22 of them – aren’t easily mistaken for anyone ...”

“... the reunited Germany of today. One of them, the beguiling exhibition at the British Museum curated by Barrie Cook, displays objects of many kinds, from the wooden sculptures made in the late 15th century by Tilman Riemenschneider to the metallic icon of the Volkswagen Beetle, in order to address the question of Germany’s ...”

“... Antrim’s first novel, Elect Mr Robinson for a Better World: I keep seeing Jim’s face, lit red by tail lights, in the long moments before the lines snapped taut, while Bill Nixon tried and retried to start his fume-spewing, out-of-tune Celica. It was all so profoundly uncomfortable; there was nothing to do but toe the grass and stare up at the stars in the ...”

“... Although he lived with pain for the rest of his life, he was amazingly lucky to survive at all. By the end of the day, of the twenty officers in Tawney’s battalion, ten were dead and eight wounded; of 754 men, 120 were killed, 241 wounded and 111 missing. Twenty thousand British soldiers died that day on the Somme.If one were to search for an experience ...”

“... what went wrong, we can reflect on this historic election. The share of the total vote won by the two major parties changed only slightly, but Ukip replaces the Lib Dems as the third party by number of votes and the SNP is the third party in the Commons by number of seats and will ...”

“... her favourite subjects at school (art and drama) and what she wants to do when she grows up (be a dancer). Before surgery she needs blood tests so I go to find a tourniquet, needles, bottles and gauze. It’s a ward that I don’t usually work on, and every ward keeps its equipment in a different place. On top of this, the printer for the blood bottle ...”

“... Pacifists​ are rare. Most people believe that lethal violence may be used in self-defence, or the defence of others, against potentially lethal threats. Military action is justified by a collective institutional version of this basic human right, which sets an outer limit on the right to life ...”