“... at the end, a prickly little warning. Northern Ireland (for which you may of course read the ‘North of Ireland’) has 18 seats at Westminster, and has recently seen two events with significant political ramifications: the robbery of £26.5 million from the Northern Bank in Belfast on 20 December, and on 30 January the murder of Robert McCartney in ...”

“... passed Neasden. When the first railways were built in England, they reached out to London from the north, not the other way round. London had no need of the railways to get where it wanted to go. It was already there. But when it came to the Underground, London did reach out, to the countryside. Edward Watkin, who became chairman of the Metropolitan in ...”

“... gabled Victorian house. From the high window you could see half of the policeman’s helmet of St Paul’s dome, and further on, a glimpse of Parliament’s spires, and its loyal river selflessly flowing between its crowded banks. At dusk, holding a drink by the window and waiting for Jane to return home, I loved to see the city streetlights arrive in amber ...”

“... that the virus was artificially made infectious to humans in a joint effort by labs in Wuhan, North Carolina and Maryland; that Anthony Fauci, America’s Covid-19 point man, was hiding the fact that it was virtually harmless for his own financial benefit. ‘Plan-demic!’ yelled thousands in unison. ‘Plan-demic! Plan-demic!’After Corbyn had ...”

“... In November​ 2017, Marc Gabolde, an Egyptologist at Paul Valéry University in Montpellier, received a grainy photograph on his phone from a colleague attending the opening party for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The picture showed a pink granite stele on display at the museum. Had Gabolde seen it before? If not, what did he think? The stele was dated to 1327 BCE and came from Abydos, a sacred city on the upper banks of the Nile ...”

“... could not permit my mind to be profaned by such intellectual whorishness’) and wrote an essay on Paul Valéry instead. ‘To know you is a calamity,’ one of his classmates told him.Schwartz would sequester himself in his room, keen to ‘impress the boys with his habit of solitude and concentration of study’. His letters to Julian Sawyer, his only close ...”

“... on a single, dreadful act that gives them the excuse they need to gun the engines of oppression. Paul Foot London All I have to offer, in this distracted time, are stray thoughts and overheard lines. First, from my 14-year-old son, after several days of bluster about ‘righteous’ war: ‘“Evil” is what you talk about when you can’t explain what ...”

“... this was company she aspired to join. She pursued her ambition with fervour: graduation from North Hollywood High School at the age of 15, a degree from the University of Chicago, graduate study and a Master of Arts at Harvard, a fellowship at St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she attended lectures by Isaiah Berlin and had classes with A.J. Ayer, Stuart ...”

“... rates, as for a few years it did. The decisive monetary event took place in October 1979, when Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve, hiked interest rates to unprecedented levels, inducing a severe recession in North America and Europe as well as what came to be known as the Third World debt crisis, as the ...”

“... sway. He believed they gave him only his restlessness (after a childhood spent moving between St Paul, Syracuse and Buffalo) and his ability to characterise himself as a Midwesterner, a permanent outsider.But​ Fitzgerald’s literary imagination was also drawn to the new decadent urban set: aggressive bonds traders, flamboyant bootleggers and promiscuous ...”

“... spread by the apostles themselves – it is noteworthy that Gibbon has very little to say about St Paul – it was during their lifetimes that it had been spread by the miraculous gifts they had received on the day of Pentecost. Chelsum suspected Gibbon of following the tactics of Conyers Middleton, a crucial figure in all this controversy, who in his Free ...”

“... in the company of a steady companion called Hucks, picturesquely intent on a walking tour of North Wales. Their route took them through Oxford, where they looked up one of Coleridge’s old schoolmates, who took the visitors to see a notorious democrat at Balliol called Robert Southey. It was an encounter that, Southey would recall, ‘fixed the future ...”

“... most of the Deep South, and massive migrations of black people to the industrial cities of the North, followed almost invariably by new forms of racial conflict. At the same time, America was preparing to enter the Great War. Wood-row Wilson lay half-paralysed in the White House; the socialist leader Eugene Debs was kicking his heels in an Atlanta prison ...”

“... created by Stalin as a new Jewish homeland and located in the far east of Siberia, on the north bank of the Amur River. Established in May 1934, Birobidzhan was supposed to provide a shining alternative to Palestine, Yiddish-speaking and playing a positive part in the construction of socialism. Supported largely by fund-raising abroad – especially ...”

“... bedtime stories by the nuns: Joan of Arc was like the young saints Perpetua and Felicity in Roman North Africa who faced the wild beasts in the arena, and her torments recalled the sadistic horrors which any number of martyrs in the Golden Legend undergo before they are finally dispatched by their executioners. The parallels between Joan’s sufferings and ...”