“... keys to the safes, so that the most valuable items survived the raid. I reached the museum on 10 May, as part of a National Geographic group of Mesopotamian archaeologists. I was also a member of a Unesco fact-finding team, the rest of whom arrived in Baghdad several days later, having had difficulty getting permission to enter the country at all. In the ...”

“... the heroic challengers of the system who rejected socialism and Soviet values, may find the combination surprising. But both the socialist commitment and the belief in reform were crucial to the collective identity of Zubok’s people. When they lost the first and were disappointed in the second after 1968, the whole imagined community ...”

“... tribal territories and is controlled by so-called ‘youth groups’ who represent the tribe. This may conjure up an image of adolescents playing table tennis in a church hall, but here a youth group is a gang of local hardmen who demand ‘community contributions’ for truck entry onto well sites and force oil companies to employ unskilled labourers from the ...”

“... worrying about the weather. At one point, she was leading Hillary Clinton in the polls, but she may have been damaged by her repeated insistence that she had seen a film where members of Planned Parenthood discuss selling foetal organs: ‘I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed foetus on the table, its heart ...”

“... to defend herself against her friend Cassie’s accusation that her own ‘woman-loving life’ may as well not exist for all the mention it receives in Faith’s stories.) Hers is a sturdy humanistic intelligence that ought to feel old-fashioned but is instead encouraging. Since each story is a conversation, or more than one, we always see people’s ...”

“... every soldier committed – who, at that date, could only be British. At the White House on 29 May 1942 Roosevelt told Molotov that he wanted to ‘take the risk’ of mounting an operation on the continent with six to ten divisions: ‘It is necessary to make sacrifices to help the USSR in 1942. It is possible that we shall have to live through another ...”

“... but the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 and the huge expansion of Britain’s empire may have made them increasingly visible. The black presence raised questions about what it meant to have such an empire, one composed of peoples of different ethnicities and religious beliefs. A number of cases of enslaved African men and women who had escaped ...”

“... and the suits and countersuits dragged on for years. That isn’t such a pleasing tale – and it may not be the story that Parton, who eventually reconciled with Wagoner, wanted to tell – but it’s what happened. Why not tell it straight?There’s​ a lot more Burns gets wrong, or sweeps under the carpet, and that ...”

“... 23 or 24 ad, he fought a series of campaigns in Germania under Claudius in the 40s and 50s, which may have inspired him to write his lost book on the art of throwing the javelin from horseback, as well as his lost history of the German wars. He seems to have kept his head down in the dangerous later years of Nero’s reign, when he wrote his eight-volume ...”

“... In​ 2016, Theresa May told the Conservative Party Conference: ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word “citizenship” means.’ This characterisation was not – rightly not – considered antisemitic, merely an appeal to the autochthonic Brexiter mentality ...”

“... to learn to cheat.’ The Sharpeville massacre, which took place on Cole’s twentieth birthday, may well have been another lesson in the same vein.Cole went on to play the race hierarchies in South Africa for all he was worth. He changed his name from Kole and persuaded the apartheid authorities to reclassify him as a Coloured person, allowing him to move ...”

“... individuals, representatives of their elected and traditional authorities did not take part. In May 2021 an agreement was reached between the two countries. According to the joint declaration, Germany said it was ready to recognise its ‘moral responsibility for the colonisation of Namibia’ and to apologise ‘for the historic developments that led to ...”

“... strategies for development and the environment should help.The winner of the mayoral election on 4 May will be answerable to more voters than any other politician in Western Europe except the President of France. These voters, moreover, are some of the most disenchanted and (until now) disenfranchised people in Britain. Of course, there has been a Government ...”

“... in the Notebook on ‘Henry James’s inability to invent good proper names’ – the inability may more properly belong to our culture, since James took a lot of his names straight from the Times – and certainly suffers from no such inability himself. ‘Drawbridge, a butler’, he writes. ‘Blackhead, a civil servant’. ‘Stringham … Roderick ...”

“... Certain doomed spirits from the 16th century continue to haunt us and beguile us. On 21 May 1940 Nancy Mitford wrote to Evelyn Waugh on the subject:I used to masturbate whenever I thought about Lady Jane Grey so of course I thought about her constantly and even executed a fine watercolour of her on the scaffold, which my mother still has, framed, and in which Lady Jane and her ladies-in-waiting all wear watches hanging from enamel bows, as my mother did at the time … I still get quite excited when I think of Lady Jane (less and less often as the years roll on ...”