“... In​ a short story called ‘The Chinese Road’ written in the 1970s by the Yemeni-Ethiopian Mohammad Abdul-Wali, a Yemeni man befriends a Chinese construction worker on the new road from the port of Hodeida on the Red Sea, ‘cutting through the mountain’, to the capital, Sanaa, more than two hundred kilometres away ...”

“... Frogs​ could be heard croaking, one hot spring day in 1688, in a ditch beside a meadow where Antoni van Leeuwenhoek liked, as he put it, to wander ‘for my amusement’. Peering down, he glimpsed spawn clinging to the pondweed. A servant must have been at hand, for Leeuwenhoek wrote: ‘I then had some of this green plant to which these Eggs were attached brought to my house ...”

“... education and the ever present threat of violence (a comprehensive system of white supremacy known by the shorthand Jim Crow), they found employment on the bottom rungs of the burgeoning industrial economy. Despite pervasive prejudice in the North, the migrants spoke of a second emancipation, of crossing the Jordan into the Promised Land.The Great ...”

“... put it, ‘fully armed from Ibsen’s brain’, their cases tended to follow a pattern. Attracted by the idea of freedom from social and sexual convention and the chance to live among artists, even to be artists, they found themselves not in a new world but in a mirror image of the old, with as many constraints and fewer ...”

“... with each other, until Chomsky said that violent resistance to illegitimate power could only be defended ‘in terms of justice … because the end that will be achieved is claimed as a just one.’ Foucault responded: ‘If you like, I will be a little bit Nietzschean about this ...”

“... had been to the notary’s office before, to authorise Josias Doria to collect wages owed to them by a shipmaster – perhaps these were among the assets secured by the new will. The record of this earlier visit is significant. It tells us that Diogo, Christoffel, Anthony and Francisco, along with another man, Caspar, were ...”

“... space. One end isn’t grander than the other; indeed, unless you are a postwoman, it won’t be clear where they start and finish. Ideal for snoopers, snipers, novelists, cartoonists and daydreamers, squares offer the chance of peering out in several directions without someone across from you peering back. They mix urbanity and slinky wildness: Woolfs ...”

“... century, Washington Square West, Philadelphia. Washington Square West overlaps an area identified by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Philadelphia Negro as the Seventh Ward, the site of many places famous in Black history: Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church; the Institute for Coloured Youth; the home of Frances E.W. Harper, one of the first Black American women to have her ...”

“... Black Consciousness movement who in 1977 was tortured and beaten to death over a period of days by members of the South African security police who then, with the connivance of police doctors, lied their way through the inquest conducted by the chief magistrate of Pretoria, Marthinus Prins. What people remember is not ...”

“... and, like them, he often wrote of beleaguered men who struggle with a world that seems to be ‘sagging, snagging, scaling, spalling, pilling, pinging, pitting, warping, checking, fading, chipping, cracking, yellowing, leaking, stalling, shrinking’. The battle of the ‘little man’ with daily disobligingness is a classic New Yorker trope; the ...”

“... awe’ lit up the night skies over Baghdad and started the latest and most ill-fated intervention by the Western allies into the territory of the old Ottoman Empire. How curious the saga of the British connection (or disconnect) with the region seems now – such an on-off affair, so fractious, elusive, splattered with froideurs and reconciliations. Jonathan ...”

“... the novelist Éric Chevillard wrote: Literature, more than the zoo, makes it its mission to be a conservatory of animal life … could anybody go without this ...”

“... tugboats pushing and pulling the hull, the rising tide floated the ship just long enough for it to be freed. Canal journeys resumed, and the world’s attention shifted elsewhere.But that wasn’t the end of the story for the seafarers on board. The Ever Given was escorted to an anchorage in the Great Bitter Lake, a third of the way up the canal, and detained ...”

“... from which they draw their hopes and fears is a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old treatise written by a French aristocrat of 30 who had spent barely nine months in the country. But though Democracy in America has been appropriated by America it was not really written for Americans. Its immediate target was de Tocqueville’s ...”

“... Minister: Then Harold Wilson raised the issue of Anthony Howard. He has just been appointed by the Sunday Times to be the first Whitehall correspondent in history, looking into the secrets of the Civil Service rather than leaking the secrets of the politicians. His first article had been an analysis of the ...”