“... of a prison. The polluted acres of the Imperial Gas Light and Coke Company were re-created, after war and bomb damage, as Haggerston Park. The man in the black coat, barely pausing to steady himself, dives into the spasmodic traffic; motorists unable to believe their luck that the lights are working and the permanent utility trenches have migrated a couple of ...”

“... a redeemed sinner loves virtue. Because of the rush to industrialise and then to recover from the war, Japan’s cities were once among the most polluted on earth. But the Japanese took the oil shocks and energy price rises of the 1970s as personal challenges for the belt-tightening at which they excel. Japan is now the world’s second industrial ...”

“... widely regarded as the greatest single achievement of the European Union since the end of the Cold War, and occasion for more or less unqualified self-congratulation, has left one inconspicuous thorn in the palm of Brussels. The furthest east of all the EU’s new acquisitions, even if the most prosperous and democratic, has been a tribulation to its ...”

“... taking place as we speak, with unaccustomed speed. (Little besides a giant asteroid or a nuclear war could alter the surface of the earth faster and more completely.) Second, the Anthropocene gathers all disparate environmental issues under a single heading, from global warming down to the emissions of a trash incinerator in a poor neighbourhood of ...”

“... to which we are all so deeply mortgaged. Haggerston Park, E2, a modest enclosure replacing war-damaged terraces and the demolished Imperial Gas, Light and Coke Company, has long been an oasis. It was opened as a public park in 1958. Its scandals are old scandals and have no bearing on the current frenzy for makeovers, peppery paths, wooden obstacles ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”