“... intractable combination of high unemployment and inflation – of 1973-75. The MIT economist Paul Samuelson, whose 1948 textbook set the Keynesian standard, was sufficiently rattled to admit to the ‘failure of any paradigm to deliver the goods’. The calls for the reform, as opposed to the destruction, of the welfare state came from within it. But ...”

“... from the 1980s, when he found a larger readership during the travel-writing boom associated with Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin. One reason for the improvement is that the journeys he made – through Brezhnev’s USSR for Among the Russians (1983) and Deng Xiaoping’s China for Behind the Wall (1987) – weren’t so easily romanticised: depressed by ...”

“... for saying this, apparently endorsed by Chomsky and certainly held by anarchists like Robert Paul Wolff, is that coercion itself – the state’s big shtick – is never justified. The truth is not that power corrupts, but that power’s rationale is corruption, and the best to be hoped for from its use is not that it makes people better, but that it ...”

“... certainly of a lot more interest (and influence) after the Beatles had taken it up, even in the North-West. And while Lennon had his self-indulgent and self-pitying side, and may well have said, ‘I like to write about me’ (as opposed to the outgoing McCartney), we are after all talking about the man who wrote ‘Revolution’, ‘Give Peace a ...”

“... proved as ‘revolutionary’ in their way as he had declared those of Frost to be in a review of North of Boston published in July 1914. ‘These poems,’ he wrote, ‘are revolutionary because they lack the exaggeration of rhetoric, and even at first sight appear to lack the poetic intensity of which rhetoric is an imitation.’ As a prolific reviewer of ...”

“... When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.’ Rand Paul (responding at a Republican debate): ‘If you are going to kill the families of terrorists, realise that there’s something called the Geneva Convention we’re going to have to pull out of.’The Mathematically Precise Trump has tweeted that homicide ...”

“... Jakobson gives examples: a Lithuanian spell (‘May this sty dry up, tfu, tfu, tfu, tfu’) a North Russian incantation (‘Water, queen river, daybreak! Send grief beyond the blue sea, to the sea bottom, like a grey stone never to rise from the sea bottom, may grief never come to burden the light heart of God’s servant, may grief be removed and sink ...”

“... born in 1941 on a farm in Terrell County, Georgia, 150 miles south of Atlanta, but raised further north in Macon, a small, bustling city at the geographical centre of the state. Of the cotton fields but not from them, he was a sharecropper’s son who grew up in an early iteration of America’s inner-city projects, forming a gospel quartet with the ...”

“... in public relations for the military, specialising in the missile detection radar that promised North Americans they’d have a good fifteen minutes of warning before any nuclear attack. He took sick leave for depression and had panic attacks; he had been hospitalised, and reported regularly for electroshock therapy years after his release. His mother also ...”

“... were invited to join Unit One, a group of painters, sculptors and architects brought together by Paul Nash to stand for ‘a truly contemporary spirit’ that would, he wrote in the Times, definitively bring together abstraction and Surrealism. But Maclean suggests that the decade’s innovation had already begun with the pink alabaster of Hepworth’s ...”

“... of strangers’ unsettles Mukasonga. She is told that their new neighbours are ‘Hutus from the north of the country [who have] been given a place at the far end of our field’. Thirty-seven members of her family are killed in the genocide, yet when she returns a decade later, in 2004, these neighbours still occupy the same field. She confronts the father ...”

“... of the creatures looked like monkeys, some like octopi, some like bunches of grapes.’A little north of the equator, and just west of the International Dateline, Micronesia sits between China, the US and Australia. Pohnpei is 5000 km from Hawaii, 4000 km from Taipei and 3000 km from the Australian city of Cairns. The UN created eleven trust territories ...”

“... police, with a helping hand from Washington. He had travelled east to attend a peace conference in North Vietnam.Muammar Gaddafi was the last influential African leader to claim the mantle of Pan-Africanism and call for the creation of an African superstate. By the end of the 1970s, with his hopes for Pan-Arabism dashed, he was doubling down on Libyan ...”

“... Labour – for voters, the journey between the parties isn’t a difficult one,’ the Labour MSP Paul Sweeney told me. ‘You get a lot of people on the doors swithering, to the extent that one piece of literature or a breaking story could change their view.’ The question was whether Ahmed, the party’s candidate in Glasgow South West, was someone who ...”

“... counterparts their children were ‘fatter, larger and had better calves to their legs’. Further north, the Sami reindeer herders of Lapland offered a glimpse into the past. In the 18th century a tourist industry had developed around these hunter-gatherer ‘Lapps’, a Scandinavian safari complex that enabled Enlightenment intellectuals to gawk at a ...”