“... reality, though it is a confusing one, as it seems to place Thomas’s mission in the extreme north of India, thousands of miles from Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which are now the heartland of the tradition. According to the Acts, Thomas journeyed from Jerusalem to India in the company of a merchant, who was employed by a ‘King of the Indians’ called ...”

“... Ivy League, ‘egg-headed, homosexual, left-leaning financiers’, as the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy described them, unfit for the rough and tumble real world? The new rich despised the rules that bound entrepreneurs in the name of social security. They detested the welfare state, which, as they saw it, only coddled the lazy and the losers. They ...”

“... them Segev and Naomi Shepherd, the Zionist project is part of the saga of white settlement, as in North America and Rhodesia. The settlers declared independence only when they no longer required the Mother Country’s soldiers to subdue the natives. Presenting Israelis as colonisers, rather than as enemies of imperialism, was once the preserve of Palestinian ...”

“... the acceptable range of political thought in a culture at a given moment. It was the creation of Joseph Overton, a think-tank intellectual based in Michigan, who died in 2003 at 43 after a solo plane accident. His crucial insight, one which both emerged from and was central to the work of the think tank Right, was that the window of acceptability can be ...”

“... for a university discussion to a church door in Wittenberg, a muddy three-street town on the north German plain. The pinball machine of history then sent the consequences flying round the continent, and we are still observing the ricochets. Within fifty years of this apparently trivial action (Luther’s seminar never took place), people were calling the ...”

“... the election.*On an unannounced visit to the Korean demilitarised zone, including a few steps into North Korean territory itself with Kim Jong-un, the president brings along one of his favourite Fox News hosts, Tucker Carlson, as well as Ivanka. Carlson says of North Korea: ‘It’s a disgusting place, obviously. So ...”

“... received their definition, two lesser known but more rewarding essays on Central Italian and North Italian art, as well as the major work on Florentine drawings. It had been his 40-page pamphlet on an exhibition of Venetian paintings held in London in 1895, mowing down their grandiose attributions (especially the multiplying Giorgiones) with a critical ...”

“... power in 1933, it quickly established a Ministry for National Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, who set about establishing control over the BBC’s German equivalent, the ReichsRundfunkGesellschaft (RRG), and put into production a cheap radio, the ‘people’s receiver’ – broadcasting’s equivalent of the Volkswagen. Radio, according ...”

“... state; from which it follows that the discourse of that Church – Gibbon’s critics (other than Joseph Priestley) were nearly all Anglican clergy – must be taken seriously, as argument from known premises dealing with problems known to arise from those premises. It may further follow that chapters 15 and 16 of the Decline and Fall can be considered as ...”

“... in the company of a steady companion called Hucks, picturesquely intent on a walking tour of North Wales. Their route took them through Oxford, where they looked up one of Coleridge’s old schoolmates, who took the visitors to see a notorious democrat at Balliol called Robert Southey. It was an encounter that, Southey would recall, ‘fixed the future ...”

“... created by Stalin as a new Jewish homeland and located in the far east of Siberia, on the north bank of the Amur River. Established in May 1934, Birobidzhan was supposed to provide a shining alternative to Palestine, Yiddish-speaking and playing a positive part in the construction of socialism. Supported largely by fund-raising abroad – especially ...”

“... her husband’s house. She then opened a school and established a household in Newington Green in North London to support this now helpless and homeless sister, taking in not just Eliza but her younger sister Everina and her delicate friend Fanny Blood as well, whose marriage to her dilatory suitor Hugh Skeys Wollstonecraft meanwhile actively promoted in the ...”

“... On 11 August 1942 Joseph Bursztyn, a doctor in the French Resistance, was executed as a hostage in reprisal for Resistance attacks on German troops occupying Paris. The previous month his wife had been arrested by the Vichy police and deported to the German death camps. Their small daughter, Claire, who was saved by neighbours, this summer saw Maurice Papon, who was responsible for her mother’s deportation, released after less than three years in prison ...”

“... of this system approached a kind of apartheid, as in the notorious ‘Cutteslowe Walls’ in North Oxford, seven feet high and topped off with iron spikes, built in the 1930s but still standing 20 years later, for the purpose of separating a middle-class suburban enclave from the neighbouring working-class housing estate. But the need for hierarchy seems ...”

“... and young, brilliant Miss Aikin was clearly its darling. Chief among the stars on the faculty was Joseph Priestley, who was already beginning to experiment with electricity and gases and later became a prominent natural philosopher and radical. Anna Aikin regarded the Priestleys as her second parents, and addressed them affectionately in several poems; but ...”