“... no hints about when we might see the rest. A while back, quizzed by a reporter, she said: ‘May God give me the courage to finish it’ – which is surely a good call, even if you’re not a believer. Last month a journalist friend put the question again, and Dai simply replied: ‘Don’t ask me. I don’t know any more than you ...”

“... the advantage of the person who knows his or her own mind. I think he is wrong about this. Cameron may be making it up as he goes along, but in a speech this can create a sense of open-mindedness. Miliband’s oratory is hard to get into because it is so full of certainty, a series of heartfelt convictions rather than an attempt to engage with the ...”

“... smells and habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb.’ It may be that Macfarlane overestimates how far a linguistic effort can alter habits, which are driven by forces such as the market in computer games, the depersonalising of language which accompanied the new power of the civil service after the Civil War and the ...”

“... was not evil, since his monstrous acts were performed for a purpose, whatever sadistic relish he may have reaped from them. This is not to let him off the hook. Wiping out millions of individuals for a twisted political end, as Hitler, Stalin and Mao did, is a lot worse than what the Moors murderers got up to, simply on numerical grounds, even if the Moors ...”

“... demands of the uprising that forced Mubarak from power in February 2011. The law expired in May 2012 and although the military regime revived it briefly after the Rabaa massacre, it could not be reinstated permanently because it remained such a powerful symbol of the Mubarak era. Instead the regime devised a new Protest Law, which came into effect on 25 ...”

“... detail, by Marilyn Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore City, at a press conference on 1 May. Toward the end of her 16-minute speech, Mosby, a 35-year-old African-American woman, did the unthinkable: she charged six police officers with crimes ranging from murder to involuntary manslaughter. She promised justice to Gray’s parents and pleaded for ...”

“... morbid, or Gothic. A poet who exclaims ‘I lost all my bets/on the living/and the dead-for-now’ may well share something with earlier singers of the unhomely and uncanny, from Thomas De Quincey to Ian Curtis. His Earth, like theirs, is a purgatory where anything can happen and no one can leave: ‘My brother is hanging from the branches/Hanging or ...”

“... for a reduced sentence; those who insist on a trial will be assigned a public defender who may have only a few hours to prepare. The producer and director of Making a Murderer, by contrast, spent years studying one case. They provide no narrative voiceover, but present the words and images they have gathered as evidence for us to ...”

“... State Department before he called Putin. Obama charmed him during their first meeting, and now he may keep some bits of Obamacare – forget all those years he spent saying the president was born in Kenya. He demoted the leader of his transition team, Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor mired in his own scandal for allegedly having his aides pursue a ...”

“... out its interrogations of suspected communists. Quite a few people were living with fear. This may have included the women who were leading us in the group singalongs. Our third-grade teacher offered up alternative versions of what was in our history textbooks, which described the Indians, as they were called then, as bloodthirsty savages who lived in ...”

“... the constitution should be replaced. In the vote last year, 78 per cent said it should be. This May, an election was held to select the members of the Constitutional Convention, which is tasked with writing a new one. More than three-quarters of the seats were won either by the organised left or by pro-reform independents, and the assembly is the first of ...”

“... to represent a return to responsible national government rather than a deep ideological shift. It may well be the case that in a time of crisis, the public sees governments as being like lightbulbs: when they stop working, they need to be changed, and the most important thing to consider about the new bulb is whether it will give you a shock. The irony is ...”

“... have done something else unlawful during the rioting. The victim later dies, and we think this may be an important part of the film’s plot. It is, but only because it sets up the cop for the main adventure, where he has the leading role. He is called Krauss – some of the names of the historical characters have been changed – and is played by Will ...”

“... The apocryphal reporter who first used the word in connection with Hrabal’s fall may merely have been insinuating that he didn’t think much of men who feed pigeons, though we might suspect he was more pointedly flagging up the (apparently) unverifiable cause of the writer’s death, which looks rather like suicide. Hill’s poems are ...”

“... the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk – DNR and LNR, in the Russian acronyms – may be the first step in a plan to absorb these provinces into Russia, cleaning up the Bolsheviks’ historical ‘mistake’. (This, incidentally, should put paid to the idea that Putin is bent on reconstituting the USSR: on the contrary, he claims that the ...”