“... downsizing simply means that some Americans are being forced to move to better jobs – GM may fire you but Microsoft will hire you, and Microsoft jobs are better. Buchanan is of course in the wrong party to advance the interests of America’s lower-paid employees and unpaid ex-employees. He is also contaminated by extreme-right associations and past ...”

“... Changelings, centaurs, ogres and elves may no longer inhabit the earth, but occasionally we run into their descendants: people so monstrous, incandescent, or freakishly themselves that only a quasi-supernatural description seems to do them justice. In the 20th century they come in all shapes and sizes: from the obvious ghouls and werewolves (Rasputin, Hitler, Idi Amin, Jeffrey Dahmer) to various mid-rank demigods and unicorn-people (T ...”

“... things the Scots learned from the English was how to do imperialism properly. Paterson and Law may have been clever bankers, but they were terrible imperialists. Law’s calamitous attempt to exploit a monopoly on French colonial trade – the ‘Mississippi bubble’ – forced him to flee France in 1720. Paterson’s proposal to establish a trading ...”

“... it, then it is. Ricks states that ‘criticism is the art of noticing things that the rest of us may well not have noticed for ourselves and might never have noticed. It asks tact, of itself and of its readers, for it must neither state nor neglect the obvious.’ The things that Ricks notices are often verbal felicities, which for him are not simply sources ...”

“... Yet Huaxia is plagued with ambiguities. And Ge’s new expression, ‘cultural community’, which may sound natural to English readers, has a strange ring in Chinese. The term gongtongti derives from an early 20th-century Japanese neologism, kyōdōtai, which in turn has echoes of the German Volk, or national community. Its use in modern Chinese is recent and ...”

“... emperor had had enough. He offered the governance of Italy to Theodoric and his followers (whom we may for convenience call the Ostrogoths, though they were a pretty diverse lot), if they could take it from Odoacer. Theodoric duly defeated Odoacer at Verona in September 489 and accepted his field army’s surrender at Milan shortly afterwards. He then trapped ...”

“... that Gef lived and talked and ate lean bacon exactly as the Irvings claimed he did. This may sound whimsical, but it’s an effective device for taking us back to a prewar Britain in which paranormal occurrences were widely believed, and somehow assimilated – by some, at least – into the texture of everyday life. However hilarious Gef’s ...”

“... was able to be in her ‘authorised’ biography of Plath, Bitter Fame (1989) – Bate’s book may well go some way to appeasing the ire of those who sought to arraign and convict Hughes for an unspeakable crime. As Bate tells it, Hughes had no need of others’ vitriol to feel haunted and tormented for the 35 years that followed his first wife’s ...”

“... machines cool enough to stop them breaking down. A paper in the energy research magazine Joule in May 2018 estimated that bitcoin mining globally was consuming at least 2.5 gigawatts, almost as much as the country of Ireland in its entirety, implying that each individual bitcoin transaction required, on average, between two hundred and three hundred kilowatt ...”

“... ways in different geopolitical contexts – Atlantic, Mediterranean and domestic – this may provide some comfort as we confront the post-Brexit situation. The Brexiters’ shrill rejection of Theresa May’s deal with the European Union, which aimed at preventing costly trade friction and at preserving the ...”

“... into a police car and spending nineteen months in prison.The corruption allegations against Lula may have been hazy, but those against his party were well-founded and damning. This fact is often lost in a soup of accusations and counter-accusations, and the general controversy around the PT’s dramatic loss of power since 2016. Did it lose power because it ...”

“... the powerful religious impulse behind Robespierre’s thought, she also understands revolution. It may seem an odd claim to make, but so many of the people who have written about Robespierre, and about the Revolution in general, don’t seem to understand why the people of ’89 didn’t stay quietly at home waiting for evolutionary change. Scurr reminds us ...”

“... setting them aside in a separate, unpublished volume entitled ‘Vita Sexualis’. What remains may not be technically explicit, but Richie is unabashed in discussing ‘the goût de la boue’, which for sixty years has been the complement to his intellectual and artistic pursuits. By day and in the evenings, he has moved among artists, writers and ...”

“... that the division level agent for South-Central Iraq was fired by Bremer’s Baghdad office on 30 May 2004. That agent was Robert Stein. Yet he was allowed to carry on. ‘The division level agent made or authorised disbursements in the amount of $1,496,562 after his authority to make cash disbursement was revoked,’ the appendix says. He also approved ...”

“... army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000’, and adds that ‘increases in Afghan forces may very well be needed.’ US generals have spoken openly about wanting a combined Afghan army-police-security apparatus of 450,000 soldiers (in a country with a population half the size of Britain’s). Such a force would cost $2 or $3 billion a year to ...”