“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... another surprise – in James Tissot’s small, brutal watercolour of an event he witnessed on 29 May 1871. It shows a high wall, part of the fortifications in the Bois de Boulogne, and a man in the uniform of the National Guard plummeting backwards through the air, jacket gulping, hands feebly gripping, his head bent towards the ground, where 13 broken ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... points’ might have. As he wrote in the characteristically self-effacing preface, ‘the subject may appear an insignificant one, but we shall see that it possesses some interest; and the maxim de minimis non curat lex [‘the law does not concern itself with trifles’] does not apply to science.’ Nor does it apply to history. In the letters of a single ...”

“... to send a detachment of fighters into the village of Chuschi to seize and burn ballot boxes on 17 May 1980 – the day before every other political party in Peru took part in elections that would seal the country’s transition to democracy after 12 years of military dictatorship. As far as Sendero was concerned, the elections were a sham that would do no ...”

“... even ‘magic’, from his comprehensive but terse diaries to make him seem almost human. It may have been royal men who struggled most with life in the dolls’ house. Ridley’s biography of George’s father, Edward VII, showed how as prince of Wales he sank into an analgesic round of gargantuan meals, card playing, shooting and ponderous intercourse ...”

“... and Larkin the remark is certainly suggestive, almost literal. As the sight of almost any woman may be a fantasy for a man, so their world of looking and language is to these poets. In revising ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ Keats was very conscious of the contrast between poetic daydream and the physical reality of a seduction. He wouldn’t think much of his ...”

“... least one chimp (which survived at Lindi for more than two years) came from the Mbandaka area, so may well have been one of Hahn’s west central African chimps. Because cages and play-cages were shared, just one such SIV-infected chimp might have caused widespread SIV infection throughout the colony. So even if Hahn is right, it doesn’t disprove the OPV ...”

“... were proving successful advocates of private enterprise. The development of the French colonies may have been dirigiste in comparison to the English, but the French King could not afford to ignore an increasingly vociferous group of private merchants pressing for reform of the now discredited system of corporate mercantilism. Still, French colonial ...”

“... doing his best to avoid the hazards and collect the rewards. As the game progresses, the hazards may get harder to avoid, and the rewards increase accordingly. There may also be a number of puzzles to solve, but these aren’t strictly necessary. The first commercial game I played was Snapper, closely modelled on Pac-Man ...”

“... after 9/11, of America’s spirit of civic and national resolve; and, for neo-conservatives in May 2003, the spirit of the ‘motivating hopefulness of America’ when Bush was confidently declaring the end of the Iraq war. None of these readings is exactly wrong, but behind the idea that Whitman can be all things to all people lies a more productive ...”

“... skills – and his penchant for non-Western dress and fraternising with the locals. His methods may have appeared extreme, but they earned tacit approval from the East India Company, which sponsored Burton’s later voyages in disguise in Arabia and East Africa. Burton made much of his intimacy with Indians, and was called a ‘white nigger’ by some of ...”

“... battled with headmasters as he had earlier battled with his superior officers in the army. He too may have slept with a few people, though his autobiography probably adds the odd fictional notch to his bedpost. Then in 1959 he either collapsed, or just lay down in the classroom and decided not to move in order to see what would happen. He was dashed home with ...”

“... journalism – he had been in Nigeria on a business trip at the time of the strike – and this may explain his failure to protect Cudlipp. But it hardly excuses it. Since his return from the war Cudlipp had raised the Pictorial’s circulation to five million (higher than the Mirror’s, another reason for Bartholomew’s hostility), and his dismissal ...”