“... which have landed them in a not altogether desirable situation, there is some awareness that they may have fallen into al-Qaida’s trap by playing its game of regime change. US hawks and others complain that Spanish voters acted cravenly in punishing their government merely for putting its citizens in harm’s way. But that isn’t what they did. They ...”

“... the structure of the genome . . . and how individual genes interact with other genes, or may seem to be silent, or we don’t really know what they do, or sometimes there are repetitions that are not clear to us, and it struck me as an interesting idea to try to organise the novel in that way’. The result is a confused mess, which ...”

“... sold £459 million worth of postwar and contemporary art in the first half of last year. In May, Sotheby’s in New York more than doubled the record price for a contemporary work when it sold Rothko’s White Centre (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) for $72.8 million; the following night, at Christie’s, Warhol’s Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car ...”

“... We are cheering for them, but the cheering does drown out quite a lot of other noises. ‘Viewers may ask,’ David Denby says in his very good review of this film in the New Yorker, ‘why it’s supposed to be better that hundreds, maybe thousands, of people in Harlem were destroyed by black gangsters rather than by Italians.’ And along the same lines we ...”

“... by French scholars between 1920 and 1970, at Prehistomania at the Musée de l’Homme (until 20 May).Paris has seen a lot of ‘prehistomania’ in recent years. In 2018, the Musée de l’Homme put on a popular Neanderthal exhibition. The following year, at the Centre Pompidou, Prehistory: A Modern Enigma considered 19th and 20th-century artistic responses ...”

“... over Maastricht without ever recovering politically, Major finally got ratification through in May 1993, a couple of days after the Danes were forced into holding a second referendum. At the Treasury, Kenneth Clarke presided over a return to growth, but it was of no electoral avail. The Conservatives were comprehensively thrashed in the elections of ...”

“... survived the Famine; many, indeed, improved their prospects as a result of it, and this legacy may be more difficult for us to deal with in Ireland now than the legacy of those who died or emigrated.The trustees of Lord Portsmouth are mentioned in the centenary brochure as subscribing to the cathedral fund. The following sentence is added: ‘Later, in the ...”

“... predatory culture vultures. In my own case – it’s true – certain vile French diphthongs may be part of the problem: the phonetic distinctions between Cahun, Caen, Caïn, Cannes, Cohn, canne, cane, cagne, camp, cône and con remain, sadly, a perpetual trial. Yet it’s also undeniable: though one of the most extraordinary personalities associated ...”

“... were discovered more than a quarter of a century ago, and many are showing signs of exhaustion. In May, for example, the Mexican state oil company, Pemex, announced that output at Cantarell – the country’s biggest field – had declined by nearly 40 per cent since 2006. Similar problems are affecting some of Russia and Norway’s major fields. In the 2008 ...”

“... like Murderers carried an epigraph from Don DeLillo’s Mao II: ‘News, darker and darker news, may be the only narrative people need, and the shapers of this narrative are authors in their own right. To a certain extent their world has become our world, a place of extreme anger and danger.’ Born Yesterday, his new novel, is an attempt to bring to life ...”

“... of the Soviet Union was becoming clear, had predicted that change would soon follow in Cuba. ‘It may not be days or weeks or months but it is coming.’ That same year a leading Cuban American journalist, Andres Oppenheimer, published a book entitled Castro’s Final Hour. But the Cuban revolution is both highly institutionalised and considerably more ...”

“... Bank economist reliant on Ramallah’s figures admits. Even so, he says, unemployment rates in May dropped 3 per cent from a high of 32 per cent. ‘My tiler’s gone underground,’ a UN civil servant complained to me: he couldn’t compete with the tunnel smugglers, who pay four times the £12 daily wage he was offering. More tangible signs of recovery ...”

“... resembles Tao Lin’s; ‘Dakota Fanning’ is a high-school student in New Jersey. Their names may be a comment on the media-saturated culture of contemporary America, and may also hint that, like many child actors, these protagonists are in over their heads. In 2006, the year Richard Yates is set, the real Fanning ...”

“... think more carefully about their choices; that they don’t blindly follow a party allegiance they may well have inherited from their parents. For Mair, though, this is a problematic development. Parties used to be based on distinct social identities. In other words, they truly represented distinct sections of the population. Partisanship didn’t detract ...”

“... come to possess the easy and secure authority that previous Scottish kings had lacked and which may have been envied by the Tudors. The readiness of almost all of Scotland’s great nobles to serve in the royal army in 1513 was a mark of James’s standing within his realm. James and Europe’s other monarchs ruled over increasingly defined states in a ...”