“... alone for more than four decades. ‘He seduced the army with bonuses,’ according to Tacitus (in Michael Grant’s translation of the Annals), ‘and his cheap food policy was successful bait for civilians … War or judicial murder had disposed of all men of spirit. Upper-class survivors found that slavish obedience was the way to succeed.’ Suetonius puts ...”

“... the Germans were in full murder mode. Historical information and interpretation, based largely on Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews, have also been added. The 2503 photographs themselves: these have been reproduced from identity cards and gravestones, from formal studio portraits and intimate snapshots, from school, camp and ...”

“... of sulphate aerosols in Greenland ice cores fell in the 1990s. A British scientist, Professor Michael Grubb of Imperial College, London, first suggested that these two unlikely successes might become the models for a worldwide assault on global warming. Guilty gases could be identified, targets and times negotiated for their reduction, and nations coming ...”

“... Bushnell, Sex and the City’s creator and its second lead writer were gay men, Darren Star and Michael Patrick King, prompting one of the Girls cast, Jemima Kirke, to say of Dunham’s series: ‘It’s not Sex and the City … That’s four gay men sitting around talking.’ Meanwhile Issa Rae, the Black creator of HBO’s Insecure (2016-21), defended ...”

“... but not by the thought of the poll tax. It happened to be the same cabinet meeting which Michael Heseltine had stormed out of, to tell the waiting press that he was resigning from the government over the Westland issue. That was the big story, for politicians and journalists alike. The poll tax became an afterthought. The press didn’t pursue it ...”

“... rabbi; she had fought her way to the music academy of Berlin, changing her name from Levi or Levy, and then to the concert hall. In Salomon’s play, Charlotte – now a reticent, troubled teenager – sees the point of Paulinka, even if she’s too quick to know what’s right for her stepdaughter and too busy to spend much time with her. With growing ...”

“... the wind at the top of a pole. And on the day I came, there were many plums rotting on the trees.Michael Fordham, the farm’s owner, was driving a new JCB in and out of one of the barns, lifting grain into a waiting lorry. The farm where we stood was 290 acres in all. ‘But we run a further 700 acres from here,’ ...”

“... in the workplace. Already by the turn of the 1960s, it was paying less attention to these than the levy of young radicals who would go on to produce the peculiarly Italian phenomenon of operaismo, one of the strangest intellectual adventures of the European left of the period.* Unlike the PCI, the postwar PSI had possessed at least one major figure, Rodolfo ...”

“... for a comparative approach to historical memory owes a great deal to the work of the historian Michael Rothberg. For Rothberg, placing memories of the Holocaust in dialogue with memories of colonial violence advances our understanding of both. It also reveals the centrality of ideas about race to European identity and, by extension, Europe’s dealings ...”

“... that had inspired him: the US and East Asia. He found other apostles, long after his death, in Michael Mann and Jim Jarmusch, John Woo and Takeshi Kitano, whose stylised noirs not only paid tribute to Melville, but vindicated his judgment that the crime film is a ‘major genre, but one that’s very difficult to pull off’. Today, Melville’s films feel ...”

“... water: Liverpool City Council has a social care budget of £172 million; its additional 2 per cent levy will raise £3.2 million. What the council tax hikes really mean is that people are about to start paying a lot more for fewer and worse services: ‘£60 million more cuts’, screamed a recent Manchester Evening News front page, ‘160 jobs, Sure Start ...”

“... only country in the world where both politicians and public favoured war. As the journalist Gideon Levy observed at the time, ‘Israel is the only country in the West whose leaders support the war unreservedly and where no alternative opinion is voiced.’ In fact, Israelis were so gung-ho that their allies in America told them to damp down their rhetoric, or ...”

“... the end of the Cold War, was the work of the Clinton administration. Twelve days after the first levy of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic had joined the Alliance, the Balkan War was launched – the first full-scale military offensive in Nato’s history. The successful blitz was an American operation, with token auxiliaries from Europe, and virtually ...”

“... holy war against Christendom. On the other hand, by the 15th century the state relied on a levy – the devshirme – of formerly Christian youths, picked from subject populations in the Balkans themselves not obliged to become Muslims, to compose its military and administrative elite: the kapi kullari or ‘slaves of the sultan’. For upwards of two ...”

“... attraction or activism on the same scale. But when the worst of the repression lifted, it was this levy that produced a critical culture without equal in any European country of the same period: monographs, novels, films, journals, publishing houses that have given Istanbul in many respects a livelier radical milieu than London, Paris or Berlin. This is the ...”