“... for twenty years or so, and they have to deal with their own scepticism and ours. We could start by wondering what ‘it’ was, before we even get to asking what ‘really’ means. And then there is Nietzsche’s remark that became a mantra in the days of deconstruction: ‘There are no facts, only interpretations.’ That seems pretty final, and designed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a man in Royal Flying Corps uniform presented himself at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... How​ long can you be absent before you are declared dead? Do you have any civil rights during this interval – which some societies set at the biblical seven years – or are you merely the target of legal action? What happens if you return and your spouse has remarried or the kids have sold the farm? Do you have any recourse apart from revenge? In Absentees, a book about the many ways, across time and place, that people have gone missing, been stripped of status, or become somehow undead, Daniel Heller-Roazen offers a typology of the ‘nonperson’, about whom it can be said neither that ‘he is a person’ nor that ‘he isn’t a person ...”

“... of little scientific importance. Partly because of this indifference, the auction was overshadowed by a sale of Impressionist art at Christie’s, and almost escaped the attention of John Maynard Keynes, a Newton enthusiast. As it was, Keynes missed most of the lots, and shortly after the auction set about clawing back papers from successful bidders. Most of ...”

“... property: wealthy arrivistes were lapping up the baronetcies and knighthoods awarded in profusion by cynical Tory politicians. The ambitious late Victorian man could aspire to a satisfying variety of professions and an expanded range of dining clubs. And within five years, the Order of Merit and the British Academy would ...”

“... greenhouse gas emissions drastically in the next few decades. Coal, gas and oil will have to be replaced with clean energy sources. In the language of climate policy, this is known as the green energy transition and is often presented as the latest in a series of transitions that have shaped modern history. The first was from organic energy ...”

“... for a qualitative deviation in the murderer’s demeanour, a frightening glint or a nervous tic by which to know him for different, we were baffled by his ordinariness; anxious not to be thought ill-mannered, he held out no greater token of a need for forgiveness than this piece of ...”

“... they watched Moshe marching with his fellow trade unionists on Labour Day. Tzipke was terrified by the sight of mounted police: ‘It’s the Cossacks! The Cossacks are coming!’ But Golda was struck by the fact that the ‘police on horseback were escorting the marchers instead of dispersing them and trampling them ...”

“... Jewish intellectual community associated with Partisan Review, Dissent and Commentary was appalled by her notion of the ‘banality of evil’ . The very phrase (many readers got no further) seemed to trivialise the Holocaust, to make its fundamental crimes literally superficial. Meanwhile a new breed of artists was advancing another brand of banality, with ...”