“... me on the night of my sixtieth birthday’ – and three long entries (3 and 4 April and 10 May 1967) typed on thirty or so A5 pages. That spring he was a visiting lecturer at Harpur College in Binghamton, New York, and a jury member in the first round of the International War Crimes Tribunal, convened by Bertrand Russell to examine the US intervention ...”

“... a ‘Faunus’ to Pan. A pet’s sex life is the most problematic part of its alterity, which may in part be why late 20th-century accounts focus on a shared mortality rather than a different vitality. A pet’s death may also be the only one its owners witness. The motley crew of ‘vets’n’pets’ programmes on ...”

“... first to the franc and now to the euro – for all the control they have over their money, they may as well be in the Eurozone. For sixty years, France has kept a vigilant eye on defence policy in its former colonies and clung tenaciously to military bases. To the fury of opposition movements, it has propped up leaders it favours. Bongo père et fils were ...”

“... What she felt about her war work is impossible to know, but she did it efficiently. Something may be deduced from the fact that, having been an active member of her father’s congregation and of the student Christian Union, she emerged from the war an atheist. The job of political secretary was a perfect fit for her. ‘She was really completely ...”

“... king, guided by the men, just one in a hundred, who had been blinded in only one eye (the atrocity may be authentic, but the numbers are certainly too high). It was also under Basil that the Venetians received favourable trading status in Constantinople in return for helping to supply the imperial headquarters at Bari in Puglia and policing the Adriatic ...”

“... and logics. According to the taxonomy developed by the economic historian Fernand Braudel, they may even be opposed to each other. In Braudel’s analogy, long phases of economic history are layered one on top of another like the storeys of a house. At the bottom is ‘material life’, an opaque world of basic consumption, production and ...”

“... These images, which astonished the Surrealists-to-be when they were first shown in Paris in May 1921, provided the basic template for the Surrealist picture, even for painters as visually different as René Magritte. While Surrealist images were sometimes patterned on screen memories, Surrealist objects were often modelled on sexual fetishes, which, in ...”

“... gun deaths and 647 mass shootings. In just two of these incidents – separated by ten days in May 2022, one at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, the other at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas – a total of 31 people died, among them 19 children. In both cases the gunman used an AR-15-style rifle firing .223 calibre rounds.In February 2023, Barry ...”

“... to forget that it happens to Mrs Moore too, who has always suffered from faintness, and who may have already been struck with the illness that will carry her away on the waves. In the cave she hears the echo, the boum that means all is nothing, and she goes mad for a moment and hits out at all around her, for she has felt the touch of something ...”

“... for 50p, today, though much leggier than they were and possibly French, they are nearer £10.13 May. On our evening walk we are coming slowly along past the bookshop, me with my stick, when a skateboarder detaches himself from a group of lads and comes for us at high speed. We don’t flinch, though he comes perilously close and fast. R. says, quite ...”

“... their ancestors’ ‘heroic struggle’ for ‘individual freedom’. Observers outside Tennessee may find it incongruous to identify a war fought to preserve slavery with the ideal of freedom, but Jefferson Cowie, who teaches history at Vanderbilt University, in the heart of the state, wouldn’t be surprised. His new book seeks to explain why so many ...”

“... Cheshire, he notices, now has a fancy knot garden ‘exactly reproducing what the Tudor Moretons may possibly have had, or if they didn’t, ought to have had’.And the men and women who inhabit this land of dead but re-imagined great houses do not, Lees-Milne recognises, all see them in the same way. In the epilogue to the book, he mourns that – although ...”

“... Riad Salameh, the disgraced head of the central bank, after the 2019 financial collapse. Nasrallah may have been right to lead Hizbullah into politics, but his critics were right to warn that the Lebanese system would corrupt the party and chip away at his own reputation for integrity.But no decision by Nasrallah was more damaging to his party’s standing ...”

“... of his official responsibilities as president. ‘Whatever immunities a sitting president may enjoy,’ she wrote, ‘the United States has only one chief executive at a time, and that position does not confer a lifelong “get-out-of-jail-free” pass.’ In February, Trump appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court. Around the same time I received a ...”

“... while serving as a British government envoy. What he gave Kazakhstan in return for this largesse may yet emerge, but let us not forget that the president in question, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was a dictator whose regime tortured opponents and whose security forces opened fire on striking oil workers on 16 December 2011, killing fifteen people and injuring a ...”