“... after a trial at the Old Bailey, receiving nine-month custodial sentences.A year later, in May 1978, Ridgewell was himself arrested after a tip-off: he had fallen out with one of the men who helped him sell on the items that he had stolen, using the same method the workers at the Bricklayers’ Arms had supposedly employed. On 22 January 1980 the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Even her portraits gave her a Caucasian makeover, airbrushing racial distinctiveness – she may have had facial tattoos – to make her conform to English expectations. Her cultural rebirth was not so much a gesture of accord between Britain and the Indigenous people of Virginia as a symbol of conquest and dominion over the American wilderness and its ...”

“... emperor Cyrus the Great with Donald Trump. Both are vessels for God’s plan on earth. This may seem surprising: Trump is no more obviously Christian than Cyrus, who died half a millennium before Christ was born, and neither would score highly on a morality test. But, it turns out, the leakier the vessel, the greater the god. Evangelicals find Cyrus in ...”

“... the Balkans, Andrew Port suggests that their ‘otherwise admirable reckoning with the Holocaust may have unwittingly desensitised Germans. The conviction that they had left the rabid racism of their forebears far behind them may have paradoxically allowed for the unabashed expression of different forms of racism.’This ...”

“... respond to market signals – in fact, it usually does – and conversely a privately owned firm may choose, or be compelled, to make hires, purchases and sales via non-market channels. For instance, China’s largest car manufacturer, SAIC, a state-owned firm, competes with both private and government-controlled firms to sell its vehicles. In Western ...”

“... damned if you don’t, lowers the narrative stakes. On the other, it suggests that, since there may be nowhere for Black people to be free, it’s better to focus on the here and now, the bardo of the present, or, in the words of the poet Claude McKay, to embrace futility with fervour by ‘dying, but fighting back’. ‘Before the sun went down,’ one ...”

“... for angling as ‘idle time not idly spent’ and his dictum that ‘he would rather live five May months than forty Decembers.’Carol Chillington Rutter’s Lying Abroad opens with an aqueous image. Staring ‘down into the waters of a Venetian canal’, the author imagines a watery Wotton floating among forgotten ignoti: ‘faces from the past who want ...”

“... liberal, forgiving, anxious to promote ‘mutual understanding’. Men need to realise that women may be put off, even hurt, by aggressive male conversational style. Women need to realise that men are not intending to be unsympathetic or dominating: it is simply that the language learnt at their father’s knee may make ...”

“... his mental state is happier – more creative, more fertile – when off drugs, even though he may have lost all control physically. Apart from the ability to think more creatively, the very sense of being solely dependent on his own wit and resources to score victories over the disease which is affecting his muscles is a source of pride and ...”

“... in view of the fact that anti-semitism plays a virtually negligible role in Theweleit’s book. It may simply be the case that what Theweleit is describing is not a political phenomenon in the conventional sense at all: that his analysis may be equally applicable to soldiers, secret policemen and torturers of left-wing as ...”

“... any white male novelists of the highest class below pensionable age in the United States. This gap may be amply filled by genre fiction, by female, ethnic and minority-group writers – not to mention the novelists of the rest of the American continent – but the desire to announce some hitherto unknown contender to the world is readily understandable. What ...”

“... the stage goes up in flames. Loudspeakers fall, records are scattered in the mud. This last item may seem pretty minor in a context of such horror and confusion, but it is shot and situated – we see the disc jockeys eager to save their records rather than themselves – in a way that makes the records stand for much else that is scattered here and could be ...”

“... Oxford, and ends with his valedictory in 1989 – all writings firmly historiographical. But one may easily detect the influence of his engagement in the contemporary war/peace debates in Howard’s treatment of the past: he writes of the decisions of 1914 or 1939 as the disabused observer of current policy-making, and with a sense of urgency that reflects ...”

“... to take the largest numbers of prisoners like proud participants in a Scottish shoot. Whatever may be thought of this explanation, we may be sure they did not intend that their prisoners should die in captivity. He misreads a document, moreover, by stating that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had urged that no further ...”