“... per cent of it to three buyers for a total of more than $15 million. Consigning it to auction in May 2019, he was confident it needed to go for only $6.5 million for him to be able to repay them all. This may seem deranged to you and me, but Whitfield has studied the documents and thinks he was probably right – though by ...”

“... not local or even regional, but truly global; another (especially with Frankopan’s) is that they may contain a warning for our own time. Yet as James Belich writes, ‘historians are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that natural forces in some way circumscribe human agency.’ In The World the Plague Made he has a hard case to make, and a somewhat ...”

“... 2012 and is represented by the mega-gallery David Zwirner. His napkin doodles, like Picasso’s, may be worth thousands.Dan Nadel researched his comprehensive biography with Crumb’s ‘permission and support’, and full access to his archives. His account of the Crumb family is fascinating. The middle child of five, Robert grew up in a volatile ...”

“... onto the skin of visitors before pricking in the ink:They have several wooden moulds, of which you may choose that which pleases you best, then they fill it with coal dust, and apply it to your arm, so that they leave upon the same the mark of what is cut in the mould; after that, with the left hand they take hold of your arm and stretch the skin of it, and in ...”

“... that Britain is about to appoint its seventh prime minister since the Brexit referendum, but it may also be significant that this will be its fifth prime minister since the start of the war in Ukraine. As Britain becomes less politically predictable, there are murmurs that bond investors are adding a risk premium to the cost of debt, since it is no longer ...”

“... and cultural significance, hosts and attendees had to work harder to make an impression. In May 1749, Lady Elizabeth Chudleigh, maid of honour to the Princess of Wales, appeared at the Ranelagh Gardens masquerade in the character of Iphigenia, wearing from the waist up only a see-through gauze covering. She had been the subject of scandal before, with ...”

“... a culture and political life which did much to encourage artistic and literary creativity.A polis may be most easily understood as a concentrated settlement, a small or larger town surrounded by its farmed territory, with superior status and political rights (more or less) for its male citizens, elements of self-government and leaders supervised by the ...”

“... affected by the terror. I spent two weeks in Chechnya, at the end of April and the beginning of May, and if I had published this report right then, my emphasis would in fact have been on normalisation, on a Chechnya that despite large problems is, overall, doing better than before. The reconstruction is massive and real; as for the terror, none of my ...”

“... He paused, to impress on her that she was going to have a treat. ‘Perhaps, Miss Marcella, it may be that in your last situation, the house did not have a panic room?’ Marcella put her hand to her mouth. ‘God help them. The family go in together, or one at a time?’ ‘There is capacity for all the family,’ Mr Maddox said. ‘The need ...”

“... it. The current Polish government has little sympathy for migrants from Muslim countries, and may have relished the chance to portray the country as Europe’s eastern white Christian wall, a spirit amalgam of Sobieski and Piłsudski against the ghosts of Lenin and the Ottomans. Liberal EU opinion, meanwhile, was more unhappy with Lukashenko’s cynical ...”

“... finally determine what the poem says.’ ‘This is not to say,’ he adds, ‘that the same man may not be both historical scholar and critic,’ but such a man would be exercising two talents at discrete times rather than combining them in ways that respected the integrity of each. The conclusion (unhappy for many) is that the effects of one’s actions ...”

“... the advantage of remaining in coils about the feet of an enemy, no matter how long his artillery may have played on it. The only way to defeat wire entanglement is to lie down and crawl through it or cover it over.The wire referred to here was probably not barbed wire, but the important point is that its use was dependent on availability: it was not taken ...”

“... end of the sentence. According to Johnson, he was a remarkable instance of ‘how far impudence may carry ignorance’. Taylor himself – my John Taylor – later became oculist to George III, a job he shared with his brother. The post was unpaid and undemanding: though Taylor seems to have been a competent ophthalmologist in his twenties, by the time he ...”

“... short Words which my command of Danish didn’t extend to But which sobered him up right away, he may even have Stumbled a bit, he was dancing too, after all. That Was it for him, he ends here. Art Buchwald, now, though, That really brings a lot back. I used to imagine being him, Living in Paris and writing even more wittily than he did, Columns about ...”

“... letters we couldn’t decipher out where the trailers had stood at the edge of the night and the May Queen was lost for hours before she was missed, her mother asleep after back-shift, her father a rumour, a story the woman would tell of a distant summer; idealised, hazy at best, he had left her one morning at dawn for the Sanskrit of rain. Go far ...”