“... married him less than a year later. The instinct to court an ‘enemy’ rather than an admirer may have been a shrewd one: it seems to have been especially difficult for Bowles’s admirers to do her justice. Once greeted with hostility and bemusement, her writing has now been rescued several times over: Everything Is Nice gathers most of her published ...”

“... terms of the degree to which they identify with Britain, or share a common set of values). Some may think this argument has more force, but again, his conclusions far outrun the facts. I’ll start with the economics. Goodhart gives a fair summary of the current consensus about the effects of immigration on the labour market. It comes in two ...”

“... for the cinema. The organisation’s determination to recruit from all political parties, too, may have done more to obscure than to bridge real ideological divides. Too quick to be satisfied with formal professions of faith, the LNU was slow to acknowledge the conditions and caveats party leaders put on their support. Only when the Chamberlain government ...”

“... justice: a defendant is either innocent or guilty. And it follows from this approach – which may be wholly appropriate in an apolitical context, where the future of a society doesn’t hang in the balance – that perpetrators who are found guilty will be punished and denied a life in the new political order. This can be a dangerous outcome, as South ...”

“... or reflections of walls or trees’. The crowded inner city setting of Gutter Lane may not have offered this luxury – in 1600 he complained that ‘the lights thereof [were] darkened by the annoyance of one of the next neighbours’ building.’ The scrupulous cleanliness of the studio, ‘where neither dust, smoke, noise nor stench ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a mention of a ‘magic, incantatory function’. Jakobson gives examples: a Lithuanian spell (‘May this sty dry up, tfu, tfu, tfu, tfu’) a North Russian incantation (‘Water, queen river, daybreak! Send grief beyond the blue sea, to the sea bottom, like a grey stone never to rise from the sea bottom, may grief never ...”

“... the poverty line means these figures probably downplay the true extent of poverty, since people may dip below the threshold multiple times during the year. ‘Hard work’, the rhetorical wedge dividing the working class into classless ‘strivers’ and feckless ‘scroungers’, is now visibly detached from the promise of disposable income or job ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... books about Winston Churchill, but this is the first about his cook, Georgina Landemare. Since it may well also be the last, it’s fortunate that she has fallen into the sympathetic hands of Annie Gray. Gray is a food historian and she sets Landemare’s long life in the context of changes in diet and eating habits over nearly a century. The story that ...”

“... during 1967, as Jordan resumed work on the Mukheiba Dam to create a reservoir on the Yarmouk. In May, Egypt blockaded the Straits of Tiran and massed troops on the Israeli border in Sinai. Jordan signed a defence pact with Egypt and allowed Iraqi and Saudi troops to enter its territory. On 5 June 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike, and six days later ...”

“... in the medical term ‘proud flesh’. Therefore, whatever Shakespeare intended, the most we may reasonably argue is that both readings are possible; or to put it more strongly, that the two readings are not separable. It should be emphasised, however, that there is no evidence that anyone before 1780 ever read the word as anything but ...”

“... newborn’s dead mother that might make them hesitate over its ‘sacrifice’? These questions may seem entirely unfair to McMahan, whose purpose is not to produce a gripping and gritty exercise in literary realism, but rather to make a theoretical point – indeed, a point against his own theory that my questions simply underline. Certain possible ...”

“... 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 ...”