“... Sajo said. ‘When it is safe, we will return to our land.’ But he’s afraid that safety may be a long way off. And after his generation dies, the next one may not be interested in land they have never set eyes on.Driving west, I recognised villages I had last seen fifteen years ago, their earth and stone houses ...”

“... the children in them look vulnerable but also experienced, as children like that often do. She may simply have sensed where to look for that kind of energy. But it may also have been that her knowledge of social forces was greater than she was ready to admit. On a shelf in the St James Road studio, she had a book about ...”

“... been a Habsburg dynasty in England. Unfortunately, her ghastly gynaecological difficulties, which may have shortened her life, meant that her much awaited pregnancy turned out to be a delusion. A fed-up and unpopular Philip soon departed to fight his Continental wars, returning only in March 1557 to plead for English military support. Parliament gave it ...”

“... outdoors. We don’t in fact know where Alaric grew up or even on which side of the border: he may well have crossed the Danube as an infant in the great escape of 376. Alaric appears in contemporary Roman sources for the first time in the early 390s, when he is said to have caused trouble in Thrace and prevented the Eastern emperor, Theodosius, from ...”

“... is the domestic backdrop to the authoritarian actions that have become known to outsiders. ‘I may have caused some of our people to love our kingdom too much,’ MBS declared, weeks after Khashoggi’s murder.In the months before his murder, Khashoggi had become friends with Omar al-Zahrani, a young dissident living in Canada, who persuaded him to take a ...”

“... state. If the Jews managed to escape Europe, where should they go? Not to the US: Mrs Roosevelt may have been moved by We Will Never Die, but the policy of her husband’s administration remained the same. It harried the British about Palestine, wept crocodile tears over the war in Europe, and made sure that as few Jews as possible found refuge on American ...”

“... the woman in the tight pinstriped suit waiting at the bottom of the ramp in the third book, who may or may not be the same ‘luscious lady’ with ‘shapely legs’ and a ‘short, snugly fitting blue pinstriped suit’ who mysteriously pays his bus fare in the first one. There’s also the bus conductress he will have ...”

“... Wheeldon and Kyle Abraham, alongside classic ballets by Kenneth MacMillan and Frederick Ashton. In May and June, ahead of the full reopening, the company streamed an online programme featuring choreographers closely associated with the Royal Ballet. One name was conspicuous by its absence: Liam Scarlett, the former Royal Ballet artist-in-residence. In March ...”

“... past, the jazz of an unknown future, the jazz that promises freedom from the bad old times. This may have been an appealing urban serenade to young vloggers in 2011, but only if they had their eyes tightly closed and headphones on. It is not the history-burdened, misery-stained city one sees in the novels of Sonallah Ibrahim, Alaa al Aswany or Naguib ...”

“... Davis remembers him telling her that he used to get nervous before delivering them. Part of it may have been to do with the methodical patience he learned during his two years in the mountain fastness of the Sierra Maestra. It was also the place where Castro, who worshipped Martí’s verses and read Gabriel García Márquez’s first drafts, wrote his own ...”

“... ministers have tried to show that the British public was right and Osborne was wrong. Theresa May, who loathed Osborne, dispatched him to the backbenches with the injunction to ‘get to know his party better’. Other senior Tories whom she also despised, including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, were summoned back into the fold as cover for her ...”

“... Germain), ‘Hélobeby’ and ‘OLRAITLEDY!’, which, Hussey writes, may be transliterations of the sounds with which American GIs greeted prostitutes. As in the long exclamation at the beginning of Finnegans Wake, language is broken up then stitched together, letters are made to feel like litter (to borrow Joyce’s pun) in your ...”

“... recent exercise – it’s now called the Research Excellence Framework – were released last May. The assessments are the Thatcher government’s most significant contribution to research policy, and are obsessed over by university leaders, emulated in some countries and studied in many more. They have both reflected and facilitated the UK’s ...”

“... with the tumult of vegetation around them) produces a destabilising effect that Padiyar suggests may have been the cause for du Barry’s rejection of them.His theory meets its limit in the section on the 18th-century subject par excellence, the kiss, which ends in an analysis of The Bolt. Painted in the late 1770s for the Marquis de Véri, The Bolt was ...”

“... it’s ‘a product without a single fault, available at the lowest price possible’. Some may scoff, but it turned out to be a shrewd investment, since it is now sold out, and used copies are changing hands on eBay for larger sums. There is also an accompanying set of postcards, ‘Highlights in the History of The Invisible Book’, which includes ...”