“... came accusations of Russian meddling in the US electoral process, followed in January by the leak of a dossier claiming that the Russian authorities had accumulated (even more) compromising information on Trump. More recently there have been alarms over the Kremlin’s connections with and possible influence on the incoming secretary of state, Rex ...”

“... video as part of its $68 million partnership with the global advertising giant JWT. Accompanied by soaring violins and pounding drums, it whisks viewers past images of opulent swimming pools, quad-bike races in the desert, campfires presided over by smiling, crinkled Bedouins. No one speaks. ‘This is our story, our ...”

“... The word​ ‘Caucasian’ was first used as a term for white people in the late 18th century, by men who believed they were making objective scientific judgments about the world. In 1795, the naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a professor at Göttingen University who owned a prodigious collection of human skulls, proposed the existence of five ‘varieties’ of human, based partly on measurements of the head ...”

“... you imagine an old spinster,’ Pym wrote to friends, ‘frowning anxiously over her MS, trying to be more wicked?’Pym was 37 and still single when a much-revised version of her roman-à-clef was finally published in 1950 as Some Tame Gazelle (its earlier title, ‘Some Sad Turtle’, was too redolent of soup, Pym decided). It ends with both Belinda and ...”

“... Banks had a different idea. (‘Every blockhead does that,’ he said. ‘My grand tour shall be one round the whole globe.’) At Eton, he had discovered a love of botany (as one does). He followed Linnaeus’s new programme of systematic classification; and he looked for ways to spend a lot of time exploring and collecting plants. Around 1766, an ...”

“... mental ledger of things I would miss. The idea was to try and anticipate difficulties so as not to be blindsided by them. My list was heartfelt but unoriginal and consisted mainly, now I look back at it, of various blessings of city life that I had come to take almost entirely for granted. Seeing friends. Going for a walk ...”

“... the air. In 1888, another daughter, Beatrice, was born, followed two years later by Lillian Estella (known as Stella), and then a boy, Henry. Rose listed herself as a ‘tailoress’ on the 1901 census; around that time she returned to England, living in the Bedminster slums in Bristol, where she survived on piecework. Henry had died in ...”

“... city). Tories are comedy material, like Rik Mayall’s fictional creation of the late 1980s, Alan B’Stard MP. Googling ‘Tory MP’ throws up a rich array of associations, from ‘rapist’ and ‘jailed’, to ‘cronyism’ and ‘orange’ (a reference to the sexual practices of the late Stephen Milligan).Tories, however, have tended to have the last ...”

“... became president of the United Kingdom Supreme Court on 13 January 2020, succeeding Lady Hale. By the end of 2021, the Supreme Court had produced 111 judgments since his appointment, 53 in 2020 and 58 in 2021, with Lord Reed himself sitting in 56 of these cases. These decisions give us an opportunity to assess how his Supreme Court is performing in the ...”

“... To​ have one brother killed by an African animal would be a misfortune. To lose two, at different times, is surely remarkable. Such was the distinction of Sir Edward Grey, who served as foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916. A lion got his brother George, who was hunting in British East Africa in 1911: excited for the kill, he galloped too near his prey, missed and was mauled ...”

“... biologist and prominent popular science writer. But observers (and perhaps other chimps) could be forgiven for thinking it was a reference to Thomas Henry Huxley, the best-known ‘man of science’ in Victorian England, a comparative anatomist who also became the leading, and most aggressive, public spokesman for evolutionary ideas, to the point where he ...”

“... forces to prevent the Democrats from winning in 2024 – or ever again. The country appeared to be careening towards constitutional crisis, and the other side had all the guns.The extremist Republican candidates whom Trump had hand-picked, often by shouting down the warnings of other party leaders, served up a violent ...”

“... African attendees included President Zuma’s daughter Duduzile, his son Duduzane (accompanied by Miss South Africa, Tatum Keshwar) and Zuma’s billionaire benefactor Vivian Reddy. Heads of several government ministries, South African Airways, the South African Revenue Service, the national electricity company Eskom, and the state rail, maritime and ...”

“... away from us and from the refugees, his fist raised, ready to fight. But his eyes appear to be closed. Who or what presents the threat isn’t visible to us.Is the colossus protecting the people, or is it him they fear? Does he symbolise the French armies wreaking havoc across the Spanish hills or Spain standing up to the invaders? If the giant is ...”

“... Literary​ fans, as Alan Bennett once remarked, can be off-putting for the rest of us. Certain writers’ books get ‘fenced off by enthusiasts, and the casual reader may feel the need of credentials to read them’. Between 1956 and 1981 Mary Renault published eight novels set in ancient Greece that made her enormously, wildly popular ...”