“... of the pro-Russian Donbas industrial region was initially named after a Welsh entrepreneur called John Hughes, who set up an iron-smelting works there in the 1870s (Hughesovka gradually mutating into Yuzovka), attracting Greeks, Tatars, Serbs, Bulgarians, Poles, Jews and Russians to work there (Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev moved to the region with ...”

“... it an indeterminacy of meaning which had transcendent, even theological implications. Richards took a grim view of modern civilisation, but considered, ironically enough, that a scientifically-based criticism and psychology could insulate us from the most degrading effects of a scientific-technological society; or, as he quaintly put it, from ‘the more ...”

“... they were from Roosevelt. Churchill thought Truman might be more malleable than FDR, while Stalin took a quick dislike to him after Truman – allegedly – dressed down Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, about the coalition government in Poland. ‘I have never been talked to like that in my life,’ Molotov told the new president, in ...”

“... general during a lull that he had taught the crowd a lesson they would never forget. The general took no notice, and ordered fire to be resumed.’ At one point, the general turned to one of his officers and said: ‘Do you think they’ve had enough?’ He then answered himself: ‘No, we’ll give them four rounds more.’ By the end, the fifty Sikhs and ...”

“... outside, the world that forms the books.Writing about Christie in the LRB (20 December 2018), John Lanchester argued that part of the reason she’s still vastly more read than her contemporaries is that she was less invested in her subjects, and therefore less likely to break ‘the containment field of the detective genre’ by making ideological points ...”

“... conservatives.In the swing state of Pennsylvania (the fifth most populous in the country), John Fetterman, a left-leaning Democrat and a strong supporter of marijuana legalisation and criminal justice reform, defeated a Trump-backed candidate, Mehmet Oz, by 4.6 percentage points, outperforming Biden’s result in the state in 2020; the Democratic ...”

“... Orage made him his assistant at the New Age. This led to his meeting Aldous Huxley, the Sitwells, John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, Ezra Pound and other writers including the young Slovene Janko Lavrin, with whom Edwin would later edit the European Quarterly. Willa became headmistress of a part-time vocational school offering classes to young female ...”

“... are not new. The Peloponnesian War was triggered by one in the fifth century BCE; the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453 after closing the Bosphorus. But targeted sanctions as a tool of peacetime foreign policy are a more recent innovation. In the aftermath of the First World War, liberal internationalists such as President Woodrow Wilson promoted them ...”

“... Boston . . . Portland . . . Bangor . . . Meductic . . . Sydney, Nova Scotia . . . St John’s, Newfoundland. Then the trail goes cold: it is said he enlisted in the crew of a Danish fishing boat. It was probably during this journey that Cravan’s last extant literary text was written. A sheaf of what might be called ‘automatic writings’, it ...”

“... Dickens’s suffering as he later and very emotionally recalled it for his friend and biographer, John Forster. He was not beaten, starved or ill-treated in any way. The factory was run by an acquired cousin, the son of a widower who had married Dickens’s aunt. He worked there for a year or less before returning to school and normal middle-class life. What ...”

“... on. Five of its six costliest battles, with casualties in the tens of thousands on each side, took place after April 1863, roughly the war’s midpoint. It ended, as the Second World War ended, in an epic struggle for the enemy’s capital. A century and a half later one can still see the miles of ramparts at Petersburg and Richmond; the crater blasted by ...”

“... as far as possible, he appreciated the work of the other two. Alexander’s concern with Rome took some extremely practical forms. He wanted to straighten the main streets and clear the clutter of stalls away into ‘shopping centres’, as Krautheimer calls them. ‘Three times I’ve ordered that florist away from the porch of the Pantheon’ runs one ...”

“... as ‘the representative of the goddess of health in the more or less indecent exhibition of John Graham ... a quack-doctor’, but Ms Fraser dismisses this association with a Georgian peep-show on chronological grounds, and plausibly suggests that the legend was derived retrospectively from a Rowlandson cartoon that belongs to the years of her ...”

“... Hillis Miller, in his book, The Disappearance of God, which was published in 1963, before Miller took his deconstructionist turn. The critical avant-garde was at that moment phenomenological, in the manner of Gaston Poulet; the critical project was to map the configurations and repetitions of an entire oeuvre, including marginal materials, journal entries ...”

“... its mass media, sometimes at the expense of its idea of nationality. On the eve of World War Two, John Reith believed passionately in radio broadcasting as an extension of national culture, but was outmanoeuvred by the audience’s delight in ‘knob-twiddling’. By 1935, there were 7.4 million radio licences in the United Kingdom, but not all radios were ...”