“... until the USSR acquired the Bomb in 1949. A world in which nuclear-armed states can be paired off may well be more stable than one in which they can’t. India and Pakistan engaged in four full-scale wars between 1947 and 1999. Since 1999 both countries have acquired nuclear arsenals and have managed to avoid war.After the breakdown of the Six-Party ...”

“... away. He can stroll across the bridge for a litre of milk, though if he buys a British tabloid it may be a different edition from the one he’d get in the North. Signs in the South are in kilometres, in the North they are in miles.It is very clear travelling around the border that the major investor in recent years has been the EU. Domestic investment has ...”

“... until she met and married, despite considerable opposition, the heir apparent. But though Evita may have used Christian symbolism in the formation of her public image – the stories of Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary especially – she did not interfere in doctrinal matters. Theodora, on the other hand, took a great interest in Christian ...”

“... to bring prices back up. But both supply and demand can have long-term consequences: oversupply may continue because of the completion of drilling projects begun in times of scarcity, or demand may begin to lag after a boom because consumers have gradually responded to high prices with ways of permanently replacing oil ...”

“... of this second portrait shows that the fingers were painted over to loosen Gresham’s grip: ‘he may,’ according to the National Gallery, ‘have wished to appear less avaricious.’ The maxim attributed to him as Gresham’s Law – ‘Bad money drives out good’ – was a Victorian invention, but he did know a thing or two about finance. Still in his ...”

“... in Vasari’s biography of Sebastiano, but, oddly enough, not in that of Michelangelo, and matters may not have turned out quite as Vasari describes. But there does seem to have been an estrangement between the two that lasted almost until Sebastiano’s death; in that period he painted almost nothing. Vasari explained his lack of activity by the fact that he ...”

“... meticulous evidence-gathering and record-keeping, and obsessive attention to detail. Trump may yet manage to escape the forces that oppose him, but his flighty and impulsive outbursts, Comey seemed to imply, are catnip to a career Bureau man. When it comes to political intrigue, the cover-up is often worse than the crime. That isn’t the case in ...”

“... said this in an anonymous article; and we note that whatever the names, and whatever ‘outside’ may mean, there’s only one person doing the writing. Not the death of the author then, but as Adam Phillips shrewdly said in these pages (17 July 1997), we do see a writer who was ‘acutely aware of how the author got in the way of the writing’. Fernando ...”

“... of billions due to all the liability claims filed in the wake of the wildfires.The Kincade Fire may have been sparked by PG&E’s equipment, but it’s also true that PG&E is operating under extraordinary circumstances wrought at least in part by forces outside their control. New housing developments have sprung up in the bucolic, fire-prone landscape of ...”

“... myself drawn to Mother. Why does she stay with King, even after he has raped their daughter? She may be an ‘enabler’, as the contemporary term goes but I wonder to what extent she has a choice. One of the hallmarks of King’s philosophy is that the only way of responding to the dangers of the world is to create a family. It’s ‘the love of the ...”

“... Ababa were forced to stay open for 24 hours to accommodate the vast queues. On the evening of 16 May, while results were still being counted, Meles declared a thirty-day ban on large gatherings and took direct control of police and militia forces. The EPRDF claimed it had won a majority; the opposition insisted it had won more seats than the official ...”

“... was handed in before Christmas; leaks suggest it proposed many urgent reforms, but apparently it may never be published. Instead, Whitehall departments are planning to set up and loudly publicise their own ‘British’ spending programmes, running parallel to the operations of Scottish and Welsh ministries. That was the real motive for the sudden additional ...”

“... Ian Allan’s shop with my children after our excursions to the Imperial War Museum. That sentence may say more about my childhood than theirs – and about the retrospective mood of Britain more generally – but I look back on that time fondly. A bright winter’s day, the journey south across the Thames on the top deck of a number 4 bus, the walk along ...”

“... anything in the way of description or biography. With so little to modulate 642 pages, readers may sometimes feel on a bit of a forced march themselves, and Mikaberidze’s penchant for commonplaces doesn’t help (e.g. ‘India has been described by 19th-century contemporaries as the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire’).The book has a ...”

“... were ‘theoretical distinctions, far removed from practice’. He is partly right: the categories may sometimes be found in late medieval histories of the early Islamic conquests, describing a world when the boundaries between Islamic and non-Islamic territories were relatively clear-cut. But the terms are also widespread in taxation manuals and collections ...”