“... A blatantly rigged electoral mechanism is not a cause for celebration; whatever else it may be, this is clearly not a representative democracy. Ed Miliband resigned immediately as leader following his defeat and the caretaker leader, Harriet Harman, decided not to oppose the Tories on the basic tenets of their austerity policies: she knew that a ...”

“... troll’s amorality as bound up with the familiar masculinist fantasy of ironclad superiority. It may be that all trolls are, among other things, gendertrolls. If that is true, the troll’s self-image as a ‘trickster’, which Phillips takes seriously, doesn’t stand much scrutiny. The trickster is a figure whose only value is the destruction of ...”

“... I is haunted by some ugly, not quite spoken event. And something that’s never named happens to May Sinclair’s young Harriet Frean down the lane where her parents do not want her to go. With McBride, it is all up front (in your face, as one might say). Seen in this light, the familiar account of modernism starts to look a bit coy or straitlaced. What ...”

“... worrying for Putin, it immediately wiped several points from his approval ratings, which between May and July dropped from 79 to 67 per cent. True, this was still high compared to most other world leaders, but the patriotic boost he received after the annexation of Crimea, which had kept his figures at around 80 per cent since early 2014, was erased ...”

“... Desmond Fitz-Gibbon’s detailed and thoughtful analysis of a bewilderingly elastic concept that may refer to anything from a medieval town square to a set of algorithms, and deal in goods as tangible as carrots or as abstract as derivatives. What exactly is being exchanged, and how, may be difficult to determine. The ...”

“... expressed disdain for those without Gemüt ‘who go their own way’ and cannot integrate. He may not technically have been a Nazi – he never joined the party, which saved him after the war when, like so many others, he claimed not to have been a sympathiser – but he internalised Nazi ideals of social conformity and social spirit. In short, Asperger ...”

“... Their ‘evil mélange of decrepit Presbyterianism and imperialist thuggery, whose spirit may be savoured by a few mornings with the Edinburgh Scotsman and a few evenings watching Scottish Television, appears to be solidly represented in the Scottish National Party.’ The version of nationalism represented by the SNP offered no hope: they were ...”

“... He lost his faith, began to write, and developed scoliosis (not because of his studying, though he may have blamed himself for it). His father never spoke of this disability, but when Giacomo went out in the streets of Recanati the children threw stones at him and chanted doggerel verses mocking the gobbo, the hunchback. He longed to leave, but his parents ...”

“... that the most recent scandal will not be repeated, so that the exclamation ‘this is not us’ may actually possess some truth.Fourteen years on from the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, the legacies of that moment of commemoration in 2007 have become clear. Engagement with the history of British slavery and the British slave trade has ...”

“... argument for the inalienable right of the British ‘to go to and fro on the earth seeking whom we may devour, under the guise of apostles of civilisation’. Vernon Haggard, a former head of the submarine service and Fourth Sea Lord of the Admiralty who took part in the destruction of Benin, wrote: ‘What I saw of looting on this expedition has made me set ...”

“... in 1939 the idea of Greece receded further, but what Collins calls Craxton’s ‘private war’ may have been the making of him. He went to the Central School and learned to draw, and through another of the floating population at his parents’ home met Peter Watson. In Watson, the heir to the Maypole Dairy Company fortune, and founder with Cyril Connolly ...”

“... for political education and morale. With this Soviet Polish Army he fought his way to Berlin in May 1945. In June ownership of his division was transferred to Poland, under the Moscow-approved government in waiting of Bołeslaw Bierut, and it was as a member of what was now the Polish Internal Security Corps, the KBW, that Bauman went to Warsaw.Bauman’s ...”

“... figure of Oedipus and other paternal ghosts haunting Cocteau’s work, Arnaud speculates that he may have paid ‘with a secret guilt: as if he secretly held himself responsible for a disappearance that had opened up the favours of his mother exclusively to him’. Later in life, mother and son shared an apartment on the rue d’Anjou, with Madame ...”

“... have to explain why Verhofstadt’s basic argument is wrong. The EU doesn’t work well, and that may be reason enough for some to want to leave, but whoever stays has to face the reality that making the Eurozone and the Union’s common external border – to take just the most glaring failings – function properly will require more integration. Further ...”

“... A total loser – no clue!’ Such a reputation takes a lot of preserving. Orwell, in short, may have become more important as a symbol than for anything he actually wrote. Both of these books seek to reverse that suspicion, one by tethering the symbol to some distinctly fallible human flesh, the other by subjecting Orwell’s political prose to the kind ...”