“... 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 ...”

“... for a country undergoing political upheaval is a messy and dangerous business, and it is by no means guaranteed to succeed. We think of South Africa in the early 1990s as a heartening example. ‘A relatively conservative Afrikaner leader decided to negotiate before he had lost,’ the journalist Colin Eglin said, ‘and an imprisoned leader of a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... however forlorn, of ‘extending the pitch and consciousness of human possibility’. Entranced by the discipline of accreting such sentences as ‘Systems planning is the true American artform’ or ‘Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time’ or ‘He took out his hand organiser and poked a note to himself about the ...”

“... singular constitutional and legal history and a fear of monetary integration into a union created by other states to contain problems Britain did not share. Brexit is part of a larger reality in which the European Union must navigate faultlines deriving from its political structures and the turbulence beyond its borders. These faultlines were already evident ...”

“... became obvious from the fitful campaigning and the paucity of crowds at rallies that numbers would be low. Matters weren’t helped by the sudden decision of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to postpone the vote just hours before the polls were due to open. There was nothing sinister in this: Mahmood ...”

“... to play fifty years ago) were also billed, alongside veterans from the founding festival: Santana, David Crosby, Country Joe McDonald, the remains of the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat and others. But Lang’s fifty-up began to unravel when his top-dog investor, the Japanese digicoms company Dentsu Aegis, announced from its London HQ that it was pulling ...”

“... been painted. These developments strengthened a growing conviction that great artists should not be engaged in concocting delicacies for private consumption, or competing in the marketplace to catch the attention of fashionable critics, but should instead concentrate on adorning the walls of public buildings with great subjects worthy of Athens or Assisi. In ...”

“... anticipated. ‘Historians have a duty to speak out,’ he writes, ‘even if they are certain to be ignored.’ Why such passion, such a sense of contemporary engagement, in a book about the very early Middle Ages? Since 1989, this period – between the third and eighth centuries – has been persistently misrepresented ...”

“... the form of a wax model, complete with model asp, carried in the victory parade of Octavian in 29 BC. Octavian – a bloodthirsty ideologue in the civil wars – was by then well on his way to reinventing himself as Rome’s benevolent autocrat, its first (and almost only) ‘good’ Emperor, Augustus. Three days of ...”

“... that the man on the line was trying to patch up his marriage, and the task wasn’t going to be quick or easy. ‘You just aren’t going to let us get back together, are you?’ he said in a tone at once supplicating and truculent. I thought that maybe she had her reasons and wondered how far away she was on the other end of the line. At Lee ...”

“... this fuss about cooks and chefs? The how-to-cook sections of bookshops are as big as the how-to-be-successful-in-life sections; it’s no longer clear where one ends and the other begins. Many of the books sell themselves not so much as sources of practical information – how to make a wild mushroom risotto – but as windows onto both the skills and the ...”