“... was directed not only against the Soviets but also against revisionists closer to home, notably a group of young US scholars, mainly social historians with a special interest in labour history, who from the 1970s objected to the characterisation of the October Revolution as a ‘coup’ and argued that in the crucial months of 1917, from June to October, the ...”

“... swung wildly, the urban areas in particular grew increasingly angry. My father, who works for an international organisation in Harare, said riots were predicted before the end of the rainy season. The rainy season ends in April. The city didn’t even make it close.*Zimbabwe’s currency is a fairground ride: but the kind of unhinged fairground ride that ...”

“... gates against what they rightly saw as the threat of Athenian aggression. In the middle of this crisis the official state galley arrived from Athens, requesting Alcibiades’ immediate return home to stand trial. In order to avoid trouble from troops loyal to him, the galley’s commander unwisely allowed Alcibiades to make the voyage in his own ...”

“... the climax of her first novel, Our Lady of the Nile (2012), which weaves the personal dramas of a group of schoolgirls into a narrative about the disintegration of postcolonial Rwanda. The novel is set in the Lycée Notre-Dame du Nil, a fictionalised version of her own school. The boarders there are the daughters of ‘ministers, high-ranking army ...”

“... All around her, businessmen are avidly taking newspapers, so Selin takes one, too.From the International Herald Tribune, I learned that a ninety-five-hundred-pound elephant called Kika had been artificially inseminated in Berlin. The sperm had been taken from two male elephants and there was no way of knowing for certain which was the real father, but ...”

“... actually a porter at University College Hospital. His mother, Faouzia, was involved in the sewing group at the Westway Trust. ‘She sat by the window,’ a colleague said, ‘dropping a stitch when she saw something funny outside.’ R.D.’s family were from Casablanca and the El Wahabis from Larache.‘One time,’ R.D. said, ‘Yasin broke his foot. He ...”

“... a vivid impression of the precocious, iconoclastic schoolboy and student, centre of a devoted group of friends, a great party-giver and party-goer, famous for singing his own cabaret songs to the guitar; already influenced by Wedekind, Büchner and Rimbaud, he thought at 18 that he wrote better. Much of this account is new to English readers, who will at ...”

“... by U.V. ‘Bing’ Muscio, who became Muzak president in 1966. The aptly named Muscio, ‘a man of international education and culture... a man of forceful candour, concise wit and deft literary allusion’ (Muzak corporate blurb), ushered in the era of the ‘New Muzak’, setting up a Scientific Board of Advisers, psychologists and doctors who worked closely ...”

“... weeks later, the government quietly released him and told the court, in the words of a National Crisis Management Cell report, that he was ‘engaged in jihadi activities somewhere in Punjab’. Why had the Pakistani authorities held Akhtar for so long only to release him? In part in the hope of bending him to their will. But also because he knew too much ...”

“... than 0.1 per cent in Italy to a maximum in Prussia of less than 2 per cent of the relevant age-group; university education was even more restricted. As it happens, this maximised the chances of the children of disproportionately prosperous small communities such as the Jews, especially given the high status that learning enjoyed among them. That is why the ...”

“... for the first time in Algiers. The two men clashed over Mitterrand’s commitment to a resistance group made up of former POWs (‘Why not a grocers’ contingent,’ De Gaulle asked him, ‘or a charcutiers’?’). In the second postwar parliamentary elections, in November 1946, Mitterrand won a seat in the Nièvre for the Rassemblement des Gauches ...”

“... founding a Barcelona cell of the Unión de Juventudes Antifascistas, a short-lived insurrectionary group set up by Catalan teenagers. After the UJA was rolled up, Marco’s story went on, he headed to France, only to get picked up by the Pétainist police and transferred to German custody. In truth, as Cercas shows, and got Marco to admit, the war wound was ...”

“... only on the practical ground that adherence to a set of standards enforceable on the state by an international tribunal but not by its own citizens in its own courts makes no sense at all’ (LRB, 11 May). Others have chosen to present the reform in romantic rather than pragmatic terms, as the means whereby Britain finally achieves its own charter of human ...”

“... was aiming at,’ and entered into analysis with Ferenczi. She attended the Fifth Congress of the International Psycho-Analytic Association in Budapest in 1918, and in 1919 presented her first paper to the Hungarian Society. The identity of the patient analysed was suppressed in published versions of the paper, but in fact it was her own son Erich, then five ...”

“... the act of an insecure and unsuccessful journalist inserting himself into ‘the little governing group which has the salaries and places in its gift’. They issued scurrilous leaflets during the 1911 Bethnal Green by-election, which Masterman narrowly won, and joined the Daily Express in smearing him again in 1914, when he lost two by-elections (one after ...”