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“... cloves for £76. Nutmeg was so valuable that the Treaty of Breda, ending the second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667, delivered the tiny nutmeg island of Run to the Dutch in exchange for another island colony in America then known as New Amsterdam. When Samuel Pepys inspected a captured Dutch East India Company ship, seized in 1665, he was amazed by its ...”

“... lighting intensifies a sense of entrapment. There are no views of la bella Napoli, no middle-class pleasures, no escape. Even the occasional landscape scenes are gloomy and untidy, cluttered with relics and abandoned buildings. To underline the community’s suffocating enclosure and isolation the film is spoken in a dialect so strong that subtitles are ...”

“... worldliness of the tone were far too whimsical and decadent for most survivors of the First World War. And then there was the lingering imperialist politics of the enterprise. FitzGerald was a rich dilettante, whose Anglo-Irish mother’s fortune from Irish rents was so large that her husband had changed his name to hers. Though FitzGerald did not join in the ...”

“... because the Mahabharata – the ancient epic poem, in Sanskrit, about a disastrous fratricidal war – is such a tragic, violent book, it is dangerous to keep the whole text in your house; most people who have it stow one part of it somewhere else, just to be on the safe side. The Mahabharata, in any case, takes up quite a lot of shelf space: it contains ...”

“... of single-party rule in the South’. What preceded it, in the period immediately after the Civil War, was racial and partisan conflict. Trust and forbearance – without which democracy is precarious – were attainable only when the ideal of racial equality was discreetly shelved. The ‘toleration’ and ‘restraint’ which ‘served as the soft ...”

“... and in some countries (such as Belgium and France) job protection. After the Second World War, Attlee’s Labour government embarked on a campaign to decasualise work through a social insurance system that would include all employees. But the most generous benefits were always limited in scope: unlike government-funded social assistance – which can ...”

“... group of miserable and immiserated people into ‘a single undulating body’ where differences of class, opinion and identity fall away, and nobody looks at their phone. Despentes also vaguely gestures towards the idea of the park as belonging to no one and so to everyone, one of the only sites in the city not yet privatised, a commons in which people can be ...”

“... her local Green Party office and the rest of the week as a childminder for the white, upper-middle-class Chamberlain family. In making Emira work for a political party that makes almost no impression in a decidedly two-party country, Reid is telling us something about Emira’s marginal career prospects. She watches her friends achieve the stability that seems ...”

“... as a cake/an ordinary woman’. She sees Buffalo spread out across a landscape ‘potted as if by war’, made of weeds, boarded-up buildings, ‘the slivers of window abandoned/in the streets’. But even in a city damaged by poverty and violence, its communities condemned by ‘many moynihans’, there’s the possibility of ‘love and hope’ – and ...”

“... the studio of Apelles?Armed with such classical precedents, painters increasingly behaved as a class apart, marked out by their intellectual aspirations, communion with nude bodies and strange habits of working at night. A gothic print of the studio of Baccio Bandinelli – established in Leonardo’s former digs at the Vatican – is the first known ...”

“... life, the elusive same-sex life of women, portraits of a crumbling high society, a world war, and much more. And of course, it includes the story of a novel in the writing, either this one or one deceptively like it. Fashions change in the interpretation of these matters, and much depends on the way we see Proust’s relation to his narrator. My ...”

“... inclusivity were at the forefront of my mind, as well as shaking up all those outmoded notions of class that plague the UK especially … I was sick and tired of seeing so many people othered. And if we want to get real: I felt that Vogue had played some part in maintaining this state of affairs.’ It was a far different proposal from that made by his ...”

“... Their father was a physicist who studied with Einstein at Princeton until he was drafted into the war effort. This took him to a nuclear materials facility in Tennessee. There he met their mother, a ‘calutron girl’ working at Y-12, a plant for the electromagnetic separation of the uranium 235 isotope. After their divorce, both parents died of cancer. It ...”

“... you would be in extraordinary pain, or would have puerperal fever, or would be dead. In antenatal class, I was told that giving birth on your back is itself an artefact of history. Our teacher said that Louis XIV ordered his mistresses to give birth on their backs because he liked a clear view; Louis set a fashionable precedent that made labour longer and ...”

“... Vietnam Project’ announces: ‘I cannot help that.’ Reflecting on his role in Vietnam War propaganda, Dawn says: ‘I am not ashamed to name things by their names.’ Everett and Coetzee both view reasoning as circular or tautological, a human invention posing as a discovery about the nature of all things, as well as a source of rationalisations ...”