“... become a city’s icon – Big Ben, Miss Liberty and the Eiffel Tower date from the 19th – and may well rank with Hagia Sophia and the Taj Mahal as our era’s legacy to the ages. How did an easy-going metropolis, not noted even in Australia for elegance or charm, manage to snare this rare beauty? Come to think of it, where are its successors? Why are most ...”

“... unspecified stage in the proceedings. In my chambers this is called a ‘scramble’. Although it may evoke heroic images of young men flying off to do battle with the forces of evil, the reality, as I’m sure it was for Battle of Britain pilots, is entirely different. I make my way along the corridor, full of faux-Victorian prints and law reports, to the ...”

“... back home, though still in its box, sulking perhaps, but occasionally giving a plaintive chime.3 May, Yorkshire. The cherry tree that my father planted just by the back door some thirty years ago is now not much more than a stump. It was radically pruned a few years back in an effort to cure the blackfly that annually infested it, making the leaves clumped ...”

“... I was working in the context of liberation theology, and there is one phrase in particular that may help summarise my understanding of how things stood. The Conferencia de Puebla took place in Mexico in 1979, and several liberation theologians were threatened and barred from attending. The slogan I’m thinking of ran something like this: si el pueblo no va ...”

“... of the fact that baseball is a tougher sport now than it was in the 1920s, suggests that Bonds may be performing at a higher level in the context of his generation than Ruth did in his. One of the advantages Ruth had was that he played at a time when baseball was a whites-only sport, and so never had to face any of the superb pitchers forced to ply their ...”

“... of Gaza: for some, at least, its destruction has been a source of pleasure.Israel’s methods may bear a closer resemblance to those of the French in Algeria, or the Assad regime in Syria, than to those of the Nazis in Treblinka or the Hutu génocidaires in Rwanda, but this doesn’t mean they do not constitute genocide. Nor does the fact that Israel has ...”

“... has plenty of older prisons like Zacatecoluca in which gangs have operated for decades; CECOT may be an attempt to make this harder, but however well-contained they are, the gangs have not gone.Many​ of Bukele’s preoccupations are common to putschists eager to mark a new dawn. Street hawkers have been expelled from the historic centre of San Salvador ...”

“... irrational, and is perhaps premised on the loss of the original home (as the refusal to go home may also be premised on the loss of home). Home swells as a sentiment because it has disappeared as an achievable reality. Marusya Tatarovich, the heroine of the novel A Foreign Woman, by the Russian émigré writer Sergei Dovlatov, comes to the conclusion that ...”

“... Updike blithely explains in the introduction to Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels, ‘which may help account for Janice’s lusty rejuvenation.’ ‘Can I ask you something?’ I asked the members of my Updike Support Group one by one. ‘Do you remember Rabbit Redux? Like, at all?’ What I really meant was: ‘Am I insane?’ Had I alone been ...”

“... trade and investment. Yet they are locked in a conflict which, according to President Trump, may yet result in a complete ‘uncoupling’ of the two economies. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is doing its best to sabotage the WTO, in large part because it has failed to tame China’s rise.The Covid-19 crisis has pushed into the background the ...”

“... of violence and law enforcement, and sometimes of international respect. The public, by contrast, may find them less dreadful – often, in fact, less dreadful than the governments that are supposed to be serving and protecting their citizens. For centuries, pamphleteers have played with the fancy that the greatest thieves and murderers are not those dangling ...”

“... you? The bonus question is often seen as a tragicomic footnote to the business of banking, but it may be that it goes close to the heart of the problem of how we got to be in this place. Through history, the great fortunes have been made by people directly taking risks on their own account. Today, great fortunes are made by employees, doing nothing other than ...”

“... merely sending Robespierre to the Temple to check that ‘everything was quiet there.’ It may have been by the time he arrived: earlier, the guards had been forced to allow a delegation into the compound, to parade round the garden with the head of Marie Antoinette’s friend the Princesse de Lamballe on a pike. ‘My aunt and I heard the drums ...”

“... to that most American of novels, The Great Gatsby. Further associations between the two books may be triggered by the fact that both narrators, Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway and O’Neill’s Hans, work in finance, the former in bonds, the latter in oil futures. So we have a British novel on American themes narrated in English by a Dutchman mostly about ...”

“... taxonomic levels, my plant is a member of the Primula ‘family’, and below the species there may be varieties (or sub-species). What count as varieties to some authorities are distinct species to others – but we won’t go into that now. Common (or garden) usage, by comparison, is a mess: you can take your pick between ‘pretty shooting ...”