“... 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 ...”

“... and in 1700 accepting the living of the parish of Laracor in County Meath, half a day’s ride north of Dublin. This was a period of great disappointment and bitterness in his professional life, as time and again he was passed over for the more prestigious offices he felt his intellect and experience deserved. His chief consolation was the pleasure he took ...”

“... his initiative sapped by handouts from the state’, or the ‘young unmarried mothers’ Keith Joseph had fretted about in 1974, threatening ‘the balance of our population, our human stock’?‘Neither Keynesianism nor monetarism win votes in the electoral marketplace,’ Hall went on. But Thatcherism had ‘found a powerful means of popularising the ...”

“... For three hours cries of anguish were heard like some vast choir singing a death song.’ Joseph Conrad wrote with a ‘certain bitterness’ shortly after the night of 14-15 April 1912 about the ‘good press’ the story was receiving. The white spaces and big lettering of newspapers had, he thought, ‘an incongruously festive air’, with ‘a ...”