“... veil has come to signify the unbreachable difference between the West and Islam. In the post-Cold War imagination it stands for so many things in so many different cultural contexts – Muslims, women’s rights, women’s oppression, tradition, beauty – that talk about the veil cannot be contained, because each domain of life and action seemingly ...”

“... father’s reign, and he had to be prudent if he wanted to raise the amount he needed to fight the war that he (and others) believed he was required to fight. He took a more prominent role in the leadership of the church, both locally and internationally, than was typical, but in an age of schisms and councils that was unavoidable; no other king did precisely ...”

“... the first public self-immolations, such as that of the Buddhist monk Quang Duc during the Vietnam War or the Czech student Jan Palach after the 1968 invasion; the practice was weaponised to devastating effect by Hizbullah when it launched the first suicide missions against American and French soldiers in Lebanon. This form of ‘suicide-as-a-weapon’, as ...”

“... hope in one’s churlish, outmoded way that the species will remain unfamiliar with global nuclear war, while recalling that the familiar for some people involves teaching disabled children and organising the low-paid. As Felski is aware, no word in the postmodern lexicon is placed in scare quotes more compulsively than ‘natural’. A suspicion of the ...”

“... to talk to me during my visit. As I wandered past the window boxes of geraniums, the sober war memorial, the parish steeples, a fire engine roared down Hochstrasse in celebration, and I glimpsed a tidy group of people disappearing into a brick Fachwerk inn. The only other signs of life were two old women on their knees scraping weeds from the grout ...”

“... Quite when that happened is disputed, but it was probably by the beginning of the first war with Carthage (264 BCE). The people of Segesta in north-western Sicily sent an embassy to Rome to appeal for an alliance on the basis of their shared Trojan ancestry: the entreaty must have made some kind of sense to the assembled senators. For a long ...”

“... and debated with Malcolm X: Condé argued that the struggle of Indian immigrants in Africa was a class issue, rather than a race issue. He was on the streets of Paris during May 1968, where he was singled out by the police and beaten, escaping with a broken nose.He returned to Guinea frequently, however, to visit Sékou Touré, leader of the Parti ...”

“... world it shines a frail light on our unsavoury situation. No doubt it’s tough to be a middle-class liberal in today’s United States, but feeling forlorn should be understood in historical terms, not passed off as a universal plight. It doesn’t seem quite the right way to describe Iranian women protesters or striking railway workers. The book speaks ...”

“... lie in the 1958 constitution, designed by Charles de Gaulle in the midst of the Algerian war of independence. After liberation, with the military but also constitutional debacle of 1940 in mind, de Gaulle had argued for the creation of a powerful presidency: the head of state should be ‘an arbitrator above political contingencies’, able to call ...”

“... it happens a former student of Lessig’s at the University of Chicago, where he was in the same class as the anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney. Eastman’s feeble argument – that Vice President Mike Pence was empowered to overturn Democratic slates from contested states – drew on a ‘thin reed of evidence’ from the electoral counts of 1796 and 1800. A ...”

“... statistician-cum-metaphysician.Although his history has an 18th-century prologue and a post-World War Two epilogue, the real action takes place c.1835-1935, when governments in Europe and the US established official statistical bureaux, when there was quantitative data-gathering on an unprecedented scale, when social reformers looked to statistics to diagnose ...”

“... of “savagery”’.As the practice became more widespread, tattooing became a marker of class and character. Many references to tattoos survive in administrative and disciplinary records – dockworker registers, criminal reports and newspaper notices seeking runaway servants in the colonies. In 1766, the Pennsylvania Gazette offered a reward for a ...”

“... that is unpopular in Serbia: a 2022 poll showed that a majority of Serbians blame Nato for the war in Ukraine and view Russia as a ‘true ally’. But among the protesters, one of the most common accusations levelled at Vučić is that he has been too accommodating of foreign powers, to his own benefit and to Serbia’s detriment. This critique sometimes ...”

“... word ‘autobiography’, it turns out, hasn’t been around for very long. In 1786, the labouring-class poet Ann Yearsley (‘Lactilla’, from her day job selling milk) published a memoir in which she berated her patron, the evangelical abolitionist Hannah More, for embezzling the proceeds of Yearsley’s own Poems on Several Occasions. Scholars have been ...”

“... Joyce was too ashamed of his scarcely literate beloved to introduce her to his intellectual middle-class friends or to a father who had quite other aspirations for him. To be with Nora in Ireland would mean a battle with his father and would badly damage his image; but how long would a girl be faithful if her man kept treating her as a mistress? If they ...”