“... 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 ...”

“... less room for immigration – and because the Catholic Church could give the movement an immediate international support that was not available in the same way in Latvia or Estonia. But after independence. the roles were reversed, Lithuania becoming by economic and cultural indicators the laggard of the trio, and Estonia the lead. Compared with ...”

“... Tony Judt exclaims at ‘Europe’s emergence in the dawn of the 21st century as a paragon of the international virtues: a community of values … held up by Europeans and non-Europeans alike as an exemplar for all to emulate’.1 The reputation, he assures us, is ‘well-earned’. The same vision grips the seers of New Labour. Why Europe Will Run the 21st ...”

“... we fail to acknowledge, we issue the invitation and map their journeys towards us.In Calais, a group of Eritrean asylum seekers talks about the war for independence from Ethiopia. They have a good sense of the history though the oldest would have been ten when the war ended in 1991. Their destination is the UK, but nobody seems to be making a connection ...”

“... of militancy there. But unlike his colleagues, Benn had started to see a silver lining to the crisis, a promise glimmering amid the confusion: he thought he was witnessing a social revolution.And this was probably why he was sitting in the cabin of Concorde on 3 August 1974 with his wife, two aides, a reporter from BBC Radio Bristol and fifty shop ...”

“... of white smoke. A few minutes later, a voice message from Hadi arrived in the family WhatsApp group: ‘They hit the building … they’re all gone … they’re all under the rubble.’Beneath the collapsed roof, Wafiq was lying in foetal position. He tried to move, but his body was wedged between the stove and the fridge, which had fallen on his right ...”

“... tenure lasted just a month before he too was assassinated. Mishal, born in the year of the Suez Crisis, was the first Hamas leader to live, as a precaution, outside the occupied territories. From Amman, Doha and Damascus, he led Hamas to a resounding victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections. In 2017 he was succeeded by Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar, both ...”

“... took place, after American student ‘hostages’ were rescued from Grenada. He told a church group that he briefed Reagan twice a week, and implied to co-workers that he was often alone with ‘the boss’. Reagan may not have stuck with the Contras for the reason North claimed – that ‘the old man loves my ass’ – but in insisting that he was ...”