“... shot of gin, a glossy magazine or a wafer of perfumed soap. It’s like being upgraded to business class. But around the same stations, huddling by cash machines, lurking under railway bridges on cardboard mattresses, patrolling Overground carriages with looped sob stories, are the invisibles and rough sleepers and drug casualties, and nobody is bringing them ...”

“... Hammer. A variety of placards were stacked against lampposts: ‘No to Islamophobia. No to War’ (Stop the War Coalition), ‘Migrants and Refugees Welcome Here’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’ (Stand up to Racism), as well as signs belonging to Momentum, the group set up last year to maintain the energy of ...”

“... becoming director of the Domus Galileana in Pisa; joined the Italian Socialist Party after the war, collected drawings and championed a humanistic science in the tradition of Leonardo and Galileo. His mother edited Proclus and Pythagoras. When his father died after a long illness in 1949, the young Timpanaro brought together a posthumous collection of his ...”

“... book, The Question of Bruno, in 2000 (dedicated to his wife, and to Sarajevo). Once the Bosnian war was over, Hemon could, presumably, have returned to his native city. What had not been a choice became one; he decided to make himself into an American writer.Hemon’s work stages both his departure and return. In the novella Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead ...”

“... Loraux writes, ‘it is more like an act of exchange or at the very least the presence of war at the heart of childbirth.’2 Could it be, Jean-Pierre Vernant suggests to Loraux in conversation, that ‘giving birth is the most accomplished test of a woman’s virility?’ In which case, the act that is seen as supremely defining of a woman, as the ...”

“... and, with it, a return to the age of tycoon proprietorship which had begun to decline after the war. Most countries have seen a drop in newspaper readership (especially among serious newspapers); the ratio to ‘entertainment’ of column space devoted to serious (especially foreign) news has decreased, resulting, inter alia, in a substantial decrease in ...”

“... He was inspired, as Crawford puts it, by ‘a mixture of angry youthful idealism and of upper-class notions of duty tinged with panic’. Working on Carpenter’s farm, he wished he ‘could shake off this devilish gentility’. It was Carpenter who made him fully aware of his homosexuality, and who advised: ‘get to know the people – you will never ...”

“... defence of the status quo, which damaged the cause of reform for a generation and fomented lasting class conflict.In the same way, Bagehot panicked at the prospect of extending the vote to working men in 1867: ‘The masses of Englishmen are not yet fit for an elective government.’ After Disraeli’s Reform Act became law, he confessed that ‘I am ...”

“... Finest. The injured included two Canadians, a Briton and three Filipino domestic servants – a class that has sprouted in the city. According to the Taliban spokesman who claimed responsibility for the blast, none of those killed was truly a civilian, because the attack had taken place in a ‘secured area with commercial stores for foreign ...”

“... Powers is not, Putin argues, a new phenomenon; something similar happened after the First World War. But through and beyond it all the unity of the ‘triune people’ persists.Early modernists are familiar with this sort of retrospective chronicling. Putin’s treatise looks very like Henry VIII’s justification for invading a sovereign, neighbouring ...”

“... Dutch. Because the memorialisation of Rhodes after his death in 1902 began just as Britain’s war against the Transvaal was ending, he was initially remembered as a prescient enemy of Afrikaner nationalism. Yet Rhodes had often denounced ‘tribal animosity’, by which he meant suspicion of the Dutch. He tried, especially after becoming prime minister of ...”

“... to the rather tired anti-communism of the Latin American right, infusing it with a post-Cold War triumphalism. Vox has joined Venezuelan right-wingers in adopting the term ‘narco-communism’, which combines old-fashioned Red-baiting with allegations of criminality. Vox deputies to the European Parliament have talked up the threat from left-of-centre ...”

“... two very different novels about plantation culture and the Southern experience of the Civil War received verdicts from the New York Times. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind – with its cast of gallant gentlemen and cheerful slaves – was ‘in sheer readability, surpassed by nothing in American fiction’. William Faulkner’s ...”

“... that the press must always prevail in any legal contest, that journalists are a preferred class. The purpose of the clause assuring the freedom of the press was not to serve the interest of editors and publishers: it was to serve the interest of society. So the great cases teach. Even in a country whose fundamental law explicitly protects the freedom ...”

“... guides who claimed they knew the way to the promised land after the holocaust of the Second World War, have turned into scapegoats for the economic mess and social disasters of the Eighties. Inquests on what went wrong have been legion. Economists, never much interested in institutions and even less interested in history, have concentrated on producing ...”