“... 2011. Throughout the Mubarak era the Copts had become accustomed to being treated as second-class Egyptians, almost entirely excluded from what passed for political life. The legal but hopelessly small opposition parties, notably the New Wafd and el-Ghad, provided some scope for a few Copts to engage in a simulacrum of politics, but Mubarak’s National ...”

“... unironically celebrated Sunak’s appointment of a free speech tsar as another volley in his war on ‘woke nonsense’ – a campaign, as Sunak described it last year, against objectionable viewpoints that have ‘permeated public life’: that biology doesn’t determine gender, that language is malleable, that Britain must own up to its colonial ...”

“... old enough to have antebellum architecture, where ‘bellum’ doesn’t mean the Second World War. New Orleans, a city with a vested interest in preserving museum-quality aspects of the past, proved itself worthy of fiction. It was, before Sallis began his project, one of the foci for James Lee Burke’s Cajun detective, Dave Robicheaux. Sallis had a ...”

“... taking its name from the monastery of the Cordeliers, the Franciscan friars. It was not a working-class area like Saint-Antoine, but respectable with a bohemian fringe, bankers and civil servants ensconced on first floors, garrets stuffed with malcontent actors; its agitators garnished their invective with classical allusions. From 1789 onwards, this ...”

“... addiction that impedes evidence-based medication-assisted treatment; corporate greed; a political class that takes marching orders from the lobbyists of said corporations; entrenched poverty, joblessness and hopelessness; and a general epistemological failure when it comes to ideas about what ‘drugs’ are, which psychoactive chemicals are safe and which ...”

“... visited in a dream by the spirit of his grandfather Scipio Africanus, victor of the second Punic War. The elder Scipio transports his grandson to a ‘high starry place’, prophesies his victory over Carthage and subsequent political career, and shows him the nine spheres of the universe. The Earth, he explains, is inhabited only in certain regions, of ...”

“... and museum directors attest to his dogged belief in the artist as citizen.Newman liked to skip class to visit the Metropolitan Museum. He met Adolph Gottlieb, a fellow future Abstract Expressionist, in the early 1920s, and attended the Art Students League from 1922. He also worked as a substitute art teacher in secondary schools, though here too he ...”

“... of all her books: best friend dead, first love engaged to someone else, the faith and social class into which she was born abandoned. But Sartre is waiting in the Jardin du Luxembourg to talk about Plato – and a career as a writer and thinker is within reach.In the epilogue​ to Force of Circumstance, Beauvoir said that there had been ‘one undoubted ...”

“... at this point, thinking I needed something more than a blue umbrella, reminded me about an A-level class I had to get to. I’d better hurry, she said, or I’d miss it. I hurried so much getting out of the house to the non-existent class that I forgot to take any money with me, so I wandered down to Camden High Street and ...”

“... behind a false wall, would escape discovery. The eight-year-old Serge survived the rest of the war in hiding in the Upper Loire, where, he says, ‘the Gestapo had no antennae.’ The greater part of French Children of the Holocaust consists of an album of pictures of the deported children themselves, at least 2500 of whom are identified by name and by ...”

“... and manipulative personality, allowed him to drag the country step by step into the Vietnam War. The oversight that might have saved him from his folly was not there. The war ultimately destroyed his presidency and much of his reputation. This, then, looks like a familiar story: the politician whose remarkable faith ...”

“... capitalism. Indeed, for the past two years, ever since the leadership pronounced the international class struggle at an end, it has been permitted to say as much when speaking in a world context. The position now is that there are probably too few who believe that Communism, or anything which could be called socialism, is capable of bringing about the economic ...”

“... most distinguished immunologists. It was then Coons’s lot to write the yearbook for the class of 1937. Lewis Thomas was on his editorial staff and prepared and circulated a questionnaire addressed to graduates from the years 1927, 1917 and 1907. It dealt with matters of internship and residency training; and also, delicately and with a promise of ...”

“... single, searing image of pure desolation in the midst of the trappings of good cheer and middle-class comfort. Because of his drinking habits and also because his talent seemed to focus best on the small moment of intense truth, he had real difficulty writing his first two novels. When he was 40, he gave a hundred pages of a novel to the editor who had ...”

“... listings there are 103 Korean martyrs, 96 Vietnamese martyrs, 122 left over from the Spanish Civil War (with another batch of 45 in their wake), and a hundred-plus who have been hanging around since the French Revolution. And for the canonised, the site lists nine full saints for 2002 alone, though this is a considerable fall-back from the glory days of ...”