“... thinking about fascism is to see it as historically specific: a reactionary mass movement produced by the economic and social chaos that engulfed Europe after the First World War. Fascism promised national rebirth through the violent cleansing of enemies at home and conquest abroad; to achieve this required public consent to the undoing of democracy. Where ...”

“... that of Palestine itself. In 1948 the village of his birth, near Ashkelon, was ethnically cleansed by Israeli forces and his family was driven into Gaza, where he was paralysed in a childhood accident. He became a clergyman rebel and a charismatic preacher of national liberation. When not giving sermons at the al-Abbas mosque in Gaza City, Yassin ran a civic ...”

“... too normal for the task. I chafed against the setting down of the facts, as if they could yet be changed. Now, having cast my eye across the charred landscape of Plath-Hughes scholarship, it seems about time for something normal. The Plath-Hughes mythology presents a problem if the first glimpse you had of Plath’s life was the one she lived while ...”

“... On​ 29 January this year, a cello made in 1730 by Nicolò Gagliano, a member of the famous Neapolitan dynasty of luthiers, stood in front of the European Parliament to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It had belonged to Pál Hermann, a Jewish Hungarian composer and virtuoso cellist who had studied under Kodály and Bartók and gave concerts throughout Western and Central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s ...”

“... On​ 18 June, the sixth day of Israel’s attack on Iran, David Petraeus gave some unsolicited advice to Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him to dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment programme or face ‘the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people ...”

“... behind? … Who works when she wants and never neglects her little dumplings?’ She turns out to be a Tupperware sales rep hosting a party for local housewives (the naval bag was full of samples). The advert is about what a woman gains from having a job and her own money. But there’s also a subtext, an eyebrow arched at the liberated housewife faced with ...”

“... to write her memoirs. In 1932, Alexei Tolstoi had presided over a ‘comrades’ court’ set up by the Writers’ Union to hear Mandelstam’s complaint against the novelist Sargidzhan. The Mandelstams were by then in disrepute with the Soviet authorities and the novelist and his wife had been set to spy on them in their ...”

“... literature where our recommendations may have been discussed. The system of criminal justice, by which I understand not only the procedures for dealing with suspects, defendants, and appellants, but also the principles on which those procedures rest, is a topic on which feelings can and often do run high. The way in which the Commission interpreted its ...”

“... has made a good showing. Above all, it has taken political and military instability in Africa to be a market issue – that of massive unmet demand for security – and positioned itself perfectly in that market. Executive Outcomes thrives on the absence of civility, consensus, law and order; its biggest operations so far have been in countries with valuable ...”

“... the rallies and protests and clandestine gatherings of the Fifties and Sixties as logically capped by the disco-circuit hedonism of the Seventies, and a time when many of those men still seemed to view any attack on that hedonism as the ultimate affront to their political and personal freedom – Larry Kramer remarked that just staying alive had become a ...”

“... throughout the Report. Before this Act, control of the export of goods out of Britain was governed by the royal prerogative and the common law. The Second World War made a more coherent framework essential and the emergency powers in this statute provided it. That they were then considered to be of a temporary nature was ...”

“... was well and truly in possession of a corpse; that the corpses of the Ogoni Nine, as they came to be called, were thrown into a mass grave and then soaked in acid; and, finally, that the entire sordid event was videotaped and the result rushed to Abuja, the administrative capital. It turned out, however, that the execution was just a wanton demonstration of ...”

“... intellectual companionship – in music, poetry and trench-life. In the end, all reasoning had to be here, inside. Outside became for him one vastly simplified establishment of Church and Metropolitan Police, to which he would write long and, if you choose to see them so, quite dotty pleas, sometimes in verse, against his continuing incarceration. The world ...”

“... This state of precarious liberty lasted only until 30 May, when he was fatally stabbed by a man named Ingram Frizer, though whether his sudden death was a matter of coincidence or conspiracy remains unresolved. The Council’s warrant does not give a reason for Marlowe’s arrest, but we know it was connected to the arrest of his colleague Thomas ...”

“... Pale of Settlement, as if they were a dangerous virus, and wanting to swallow and absorb them by destroying their separate identity. Twenty-five sounds suspiciously like a mythic number, but Russian reality has often had a mythic quality, so it is possible that some such scheme at one time existed, and even a much shorter term of military service would ...”