“... and has the ninth largest economy – who grew up not just working-class but poor. His biographer John French points out that Lula learned to read when he was ten, didn’t always have enough to eat, left school at twelve, and came from the impoverished, stigmatised north-east of the country, with the accent to prove it. Class and regional identification were ...”

“... led al-Suri to assume, not unreasonably, that he and other jihadis had a tacit agreement with John Major that they ‘would never target Britain as long as the security forces left us alone’, and he abided by the ‘truce’. He spoke regularly to al-Zawahiri from a telephone box in the London suburbs, and came to serve as a liaison between British ...”

“... standard interpretation in an era that increasingly sought to reconcile biblical history with the laws of nature. As Allen puts it, science ‘had finally entered the story of Noah’.Following in Buteo’s footsteps, Athanasius Kircher offered the ‘most elaborate’ 17th-century account of the ark. Kircher had inventive solutions to the holes in the ...”

“... to the church and murdered the lot of them. A thousand years later, in 2008, excavations at St John’s College uncovered 37 sturdy Nordic skeletons, all men aged between 16 and 25. Some English historians suggested that this was a rare instance of Ethelred’s orders being carried out. But the following year, archaeologists excavating the site of the new ...”

“... when the Nazis discovered that the Wittgensteins had Jewish ancestors and so, by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, were suddenly liable to have their considerable wealth confiscated. How this self-invented dynasty dealt with and survived the loss of what Ludwig would call, in his philosophical writings, their ‘form of life’, and what this return of a ...”

“... Loi Taubira’s second article in the name of ‘parallelism’ (with the dubious logic that both laws attempted to mandate an ‘official history’). In his foreword to Edouard Glissant’s Mémoires des esclavages, the former prime minister Dominique de Villepin writes that ‘today France wants to look into the face of this tragedy that has left so many ...”

“... Cosmos Trilogy, a reverse Commedia that begins in the ‘pre-universe’ not yet subject to the laws of space-time, when ‘None of it/Does not make sense.’ The suspicion that we are literally nothing is confirmed: It is the invisible Dark matter we are not made of That I am afraid of. Most of the universe consists of this. The trilogy ends in a literal ...”

“... The only public figure to denounce capitalism in the past 25 years, Hobsbawm claims, was Pope John Paul II. All the same, another couple of decades later, the fainthearted witnessed a system so exultant and impregnable that it only just managed to keep the cash machines open on the high streets. Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in the year of the Bolshevik ...”

“... the prevailing condition of interdependence across the modern world. Neil MacCormick’s father, John, was the principal begetter of the SNP, from which he became estranged during the Second World War. At the queen’s accession MacCormick senior, still a leading nationalist but operating outside the ranks of the SNP, instigated the legal proceedings ...”

“... presence in the country involves piping up every ten minutes with ‘Danny Boy’. In his play John Bull’s Other Island (1904), which the prime minister of the day, Herbert Asquith, saw five times, Shaw presents a dismally accurate vision of the Free State that would emerge almost twenty years later: the contempt of the new farming class for landless ...”

“... as a setting for sculpture are the consequences of a single-minded pursuit by its main architect, John Russell Pope, of its underlying purpose, which was to provide a famous dealer in need of respectability, Lord Duveen, with a chance to display his munificence on a colossal scale. So the space seems designed to diminish any person or thing that enters ...”

“... the factors that condition it, and it is for the ruler to reshape a people by giving it the best laws that he or she can devise, and not, as Montesquieu had argued, the best it is in a condition to accept. Diderot could be eloquent in his denunciation of slavery, but he argued that the Russians should have taken advantage of their temporary occupation of ...”

“... A subtler, and more economical, exercise in revisionism was performed by the Melbourne historian John Hirst in Convict Society and its Enemies (1983). Hirst studied the early history of New South Wales, intent on understanding how a penal colony had changed into a free society. As he stripped away the anti-transportation campaigners’ caricatures and ...”

“... but not with the same exuberance or obstinacy,’ he replies. But is Marianne more obstinate than John Bull, whom the Encyclopédie Larousse defines as ‘the nickname given to the English people to indicate their obstinacy’? He gives no answer. This book is not a work of comparative history. Intellectually, it is less powerful than his earlier ...”

“... they aren’t overpowered by what they have to convey: they pick up mass, but – against the laws of physics – without decelerating, still at the speed of thought. The reader is exasperated by his own dull-wittedness, but struggles on. One often feels tempted to throw the whole thing at a computer and say: ‘Here, you do it.’ But that is the price ...”