“... used by beggars and vagabonds’, ‘a particular form of speaking peculiar to some certain class or body of men’, ‘a whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms’, ‘barbarous jargon’. John scorns Boswell and Johnson’s fantasies of human goodness and curiosity. Abandoned by his brother and envious of his ‘playing Plato to ...”

“... than 500 miles an hour and exploded in a fireball that lit the sky. The cockpit, with the first-class section still attached, landed beside a church in the village of Tundergarth. Over the next few days rescuers made a fingertip search of the crash site: 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 people on the ground had been killed. Bodies and debris were ...”

“... who profit from state-funded violence and who advertise their greed as a self-righteous war on evil. It is nice to see that, after a century and a half of misinformed adulation, Vidocq is finally getting his just deserts. Eugène-François Vidocq was born in 1775 in Arras, where his parents ran a bakery. After bullying and pilfering his way through ...”

“... to cook for the salade niçoise I switch on TV and catch a clip of the always excellent World at War, and it’s Speer talking. Speer escaped the death penalty at Nuremberg and ultimately survived for one reason alone: class. He could have been an English gentleman. The person he most resembles is Kenneth ...”

“... federal grants for health, welfare and education. He believes that America is mired in a ‘silent war’ between Christians and the left, but his advocacy of ‘religious liberty’ – for example, the right of a business to refuse to serve a gay couple – does not extend to Muslims, whom he would monitor and regulate. He has claimed that parts of Europe ...”

“... arguing that the IRA would have to abandon the 1975 ceasefire and fight a lower-level ‘long war’ to exhaust London. But as that phase of the conflict unfolded, it became clear that a prolonged campaign wouldn’t be any more successful in forcing the Brits out. By the 1980s, when Adams was developing a political strategy to go alongside the military ...”

“... the Turkish village of Guenyeli and the Greek village of Autokoi. This was during the civil war at the time known as the Cyprus Emergency, and the aim of the mission was to prevent either village taking reprisals against the other. While his men were getting into position, Waugh noticed that something was blocking the elevation of the machine gun on the ...”

“... I thought of Lydia Davis’s story ‘Happiest Moment’, about a man in a beginners’ language class. ‘At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.’ Imagine ...”

“... so emotionally involved, and her story was not at an end? Frankly tells the story of a shy working-class girl who made her way to the top, and what it cost her. But until events have run their course – until Murrell has appeared in court, which is unlikely to happen until after May next year, and the culture war has ...”

“... disengagement; and the 29-second-long handshake in 2017 between Trump and Macron was a macho war of wills. A delicate pale hand might indicate that someone doesn’t do manual work; the aged were said to be ‘hoary-handed’ (grey and withered), while sons of the soil are ‘horny-handed’ (rough and calloused). But there was also a purportedly expert ...”

“... error, or who argue, in the face of that critique, that amnesty was the only way of averting civil war, do not put it quite like this. There is no doubt in Allan Boesak’s mind that the question of the Cradock Four would have been part of the secret negotiations between the ANC and the apartheid leaders: ‘The generals and architects of apartheid had ...”

“... unity. Trump has ignored them, so Clinton and Obama announce elaborate online events to honour the Class of 2020, who will not have graduation ceremonies this year; and Bush, who rarely speaks publicly, releases a slick video with music and images of health workers and ‘ordinary’ citizens in masks. He says: ‘Let us remember how small our differences are ...”

“... backwoods town of Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia may have seen a little excitement during the war, with passing armies, and loud meetings of brothers and sisters of the left arguing their position on this and that, but once the war was over and the soldiers on R&R had gone back to their real homes, it became a desert ...”

“... Not that Gay was unpartisan. He had fled the insanities of Nazi Germany before the war, and his ‘comprehensive interpretation’ of 18th-century thought was in part an expression of gratitude to the United States, which had welcomed him as a refugee and become his home. Gay presented the thinkers of the Enlightenment as a kind of family, cosy ...”

“... on it. There was no Facebook or Twitter, there were no smartphones to hunch over. The managerial class looked at early websites and tried to put them into existing categories: this one was a bit like an encyclopedia, that one was a bit like a library, this one was basically a mail order catalogue, and that one, well, it was just a newspaper, wasn’t ...”