“... a clear day and you could see for miles. From her flat on the 23rd floor, Rania texted one of her best friends from back home and they talked about facts. Who you love is a fact and the meals you cook are facts. When the sun shines it is a fact of God and England is a fact of life. Rania always said she had preferred living in Mile End because the markets ...”

“... others, and aid donors with limited budgets wanted to know which to prioritise. The nutritionist Nicholas Haan and his colleagues at the UN’s food security and nutrition analysis unit in Somalia developed a five-phase scale with colour-coded maps to represent a composite of three kinds of data: on households’ access to food, child malnutrition levels and ...”

“... high in early 2020. Markets were booming. He was confident of re-election, for which he thought it best to dispense with any policy platform at all. Those dreams were crushed by a crisis for which Trump was the least well suited of all recent presidents – a pandemic with obscure origins in China. He answered with erratic conspiracy theories and failed to ...”

“... Once again their ages aren’t specified, though eventually Roland is revealed as the youngest and Nicholas must be the oldest since their mother singles him out for scolding. David and Helen are in the middle, one way or the other – these are the only siblings in human history for whom birth order has no significance. If Garner, an only child ...”

“... fewer children.’ The piece discusses a widely cited paper by Seth Wynes and Kimberly Nicholas published in Environmental Research Letters in which the researchers considered ‘a broad range of individual lifestyle choices’ and came up with recommendations for four ‘high impact’ actions which had ‘the potential to contribute to systemic ...”

“... of breaststroking on a kindly thermal above the lesser towers and steeples of London, like St Nicholas of Bari in the quattrocento painting by Bicci di Lorenzo in the Ashmolean. But the fantasy doesn’t quite play. The integrity of the view is broken by squared columns and the metal frames of window panels, turning the spread of the city below into a ...”

“... an earlier age, in which, presumably, Americans regarded their enemies with amused courtliness at best and a chivalrous anger at worst. Gone from the record are the genocidal campaigns against native Americans, or the various interventions, from Central and South America to the Pacific, North Africa, Europe and Asia, pitting Americans against local enemies ...”

“... hard to cultivate since the end of the Troubles.Xenophobia: In December, the BBC correspondent Nicholas Watt talked to an unnamed ‘Tory grandee’ who insisted that ‘the Irish really should know their place’ when it came to Brexit. (‘You’d swear we created the problem,’ the taoiseach had complained in October.) On 16 December, Fergal Keane ...”

“... have been involved in simultaneously writing The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, then beginning Nicholas Nickleby nine months before Oliver Twist was finished as relentless monthly serialisation schedules obliged him to meet deadline after deadline. By the time the tenth and last child was born, he was publishing his ninth novel. He was also editing ...”

“... cellars, cooperage, cobbled yards – acted, along with the Spitalfields fruit and veg market and Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, as a buffer-reef against the encroachment of the City. A benevolent and paternalistic employer was lost, along with the heady drench of hops from the brewery and the wild gardens of adjacent streets. Joseph flogged the ...”

“... other stirring deeds, his upright hero Erast Fandorin thwarts a plot to hold the coronation of Nicholas II to ransom. More than 15 million copies of the Fandorin series have been sold since 1998, and box-office hits have duly followed. The Councillor of State, in which Fandorin rescues the throne, stars Russia’s favourite actor/film-maker Nikita ...”

“... fed to the New York Post consisting of make-believe quotes from his then mistress Marla Maples (‘Best Sex I’ve Ever Had’) became a PR platform for the licensing of his celebrated name to murky investors from Russia, China and Saudi Arabia who were looking for an American frontman. His salvation was a double play of a con.The glitzier the gigantic bronze ...”

“... them the land. The Ridleys weren’t quite done with coal: it was the present viscount’s uncle Nicholas, later Thatcher’s transport secretary, who came up with the plan to stockpile coal at power stations, a tactic that weakened the power of the miners. In the 2010s, a new opencast coal mine operated on Ridley land on the other side of the A1 from ...”