“... anyone who wasn’t Syrian, Iraqi or Afghan; later, everyone. Since then, while the rhetoric may vary, the actions taken have been broadly consistent: a shoring up of the old border regime, the toughening of conditions inside Europe to deter migrants, and the further outsourcing of European border control to governments in Asia, the Middle East and ...”

“... business of the Jewish people.It was just the beginning of Sartre’s crisis with the Arabs. On 27 May, he began writing his introduction to the special issue, again affirming his ‘neutrality – or if you will – absence’. But his commitment to neutrality had already been severely tested by Nasser’s show of force in the Sinai. ‘The Jews threaten ...”

“... On​ 23 May 2014, Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old college dropout, became the world’s most famous ‘incel’ – involuntary celibate. The term can, in theory, be applied to both men and women, but in practice it picks out not sexless men in general, but a certain kind of sexless man: the kind who is convinced he is owed sex, and is enraged by the women who deprive him of it ...”

“... powerful armies – and a nuclear arsenal, the only one in the region. The atrocities of 7 October may be reminiscent of pogroms, but Israel is not the Pale of Settlement.As the historian Enzo Traverso has observed, the Jewish people ‘now occupies a quite unique position in the memories of the Western world. Its sufferings are proclaimed and the object of ...”

“... to help her, and they started recording the music that would become her first album, To Whom It May Concern.Their next home, in Hidden Hills, California, was a rustic idyll, with fruit trees, horses, goats, chickens and peacocks, a 600-year-old oak tree with a swing. Riley and Ben spent their days ‘crashing bikes and running off finding snakes and getting ...”

“... too busy, too grandiose, too much craning your neck. The best way to view a grand painted ceiling may be from a beanbag such as those now placed on the floor of the Banqueting House in Whitehall, into which visitors can sink while gazing up at the enormous panels Rubens painted for Charles I. Hardie shows how these ceiling paintings reworked classical images ...”

“... What​ a difference six inches can make. George Orwell was shot in the neck on 20 May 1937 while fighting in the Spanish Civil War for the POUM (roughly translatable as ‘The Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification’). He was six foot two. If he’d been five foot eight the bullet would have gone through his head ...”

“... restitution?’ Anne Wetsi Mpoma, a Congolese gallerist based in Brussels, argues that provenance may even be an obstacle to restitution. It’s easy to imagine an artefact stranded in limbo as scholars rummage in the archive hoping to discover how it made its way to Belgium 150 years ago. Near the end of his life, dogged by criticism of the Free ...”

“... symbolism could not be clearer: the army belongs at the heart of the country. Civilian politicians may play whatever games they wish, but only in the designated government compound.The political dominance of Pakistan’s armed forces is a well-established fact. At their worst (three stints of military dictatorship since 1958), the country’s politics have ...”

“... it has wrought is due to seventeen years of wage stagnation, unprecedented in industrial times. It may be an act of noble honesty, political naivety or both, but Starmer and Reeves have evidently reasoned that they cannot set about promising a brighter future without confronting the present blight.More exciting for Westminster policy nerds has been the ...”

“... railways and the trade routes of global capitalism. Spreading from Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan) in May 1889, across continental Europe, it reached the United States by late December. The Pall Mall Gazette reported that ‘Londoners, and indeed all English people, will feel a certain amount of alarm, or at all events considerable interest, in the accounts which ...”

“... campaign team and [the] Kremlin’ – evidence that the dossier glaringly failed to provide.In May 2017, Robert Mueller, the former head of the FBI, was appointed special counsel to oversee the official investigation into Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election. After nearly two years of exhaustive research, the Mueller Report found no ...”

“... he was told. ‘Most of them are consecrated penitents. Every year there is a service when they may be consecrated. They are much respected by the others. When they die they are buried with the nuns. The others are buried in the common burial ground.’ One of the most revealing aspects of this snippet of conversation is how important the matter of where ...”

“... her hands as she tries to enter into a conversation among Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Theresa May and Christine Lagarde, who grimaces. It is reported that a ‘friendship tree’, given months earlier by Macron to Trump and ceremoniously planted by both on the White House lawn as a symbol of the ties that bind France and the US, immediately died.*Before ...”

“... Francine du Plessix Gray – ‘Francine Duplicitous Gray’, as Roth called her. Interviewing may not have been Miller’s forte but what was his forte? He made such a skimpy mess of the Notes on the Text for Volume Three of Roth’s Library of America edition that Roth went apoplectic in a barrage of faxes that must have had little lightning bolts ...”