“... and one demonstrator, Blair Peach, was killed. Blair Peach’s funeral, 13 June 1979. On 27 May the following year, an inquest jury reached a verdict in Peach’s case of death by misadventure. But the jurors had not been given access to all the relevant information. Soon after Peach’s death, Commander John Cass, chief of the Metropolitan Police’s ...”

“... more than three times higher than that of the best of its human opponents. ‘Quiz-show contestant may be the first job made redundant by Watson,’ one of the vanquished men said, ‘but I’m sure it won’t be the last.’ Watson’s achievement is a sign of how much progress has been made in machine learning, the process by which computer algorithms ...”

“... consummation of my despair I understand that – should he ever recover – both these affections may remain with him for life. Good God! What a destiny of horror! Scarcely 18 years of age, just entering the portals as it were of life, and already cut off from all intercourse with his fellow-creatures, and immured in endless darkness! He himself, poor ...”

“... plates.Labour had its revenge on the Tories for the loss of the National Care Service: Theresa May’s proposal to include the value of an individual’s home in calculating their full social care costs – it currently counts only towards residential care – helped destroy her majority in the 2017 election (the media called it the ‘dementia tax’). In ...”

“... of the competitiveness of his profession and of any infections of aggressive masculinity he may have picked up from reading Emerson or the ever-devious Hawthorne. His contentions are that in the North-Eastern United States before the Civil War ‘the reigning ideology of manhood oriented itself toward power, not feeling’ – such dichotomies ...”

“... couples who were solemnly kissing the icon in the small church at Peredelkino – a church that may only recently have opened again, along with hundreds of others – were not interested in aesthetic quality; they were enacting a ritual practice mocked in 1922 by Mayakovsky in one of his so-called ‘Agitpoems’, written for Soviet newspapers: And while ...”

“... three dozen kinds of birds. Henrik’s letters to Kierkegaard, mumbling and incoherent as they may be, tell of an immense affection and admiration that could not find out the source of their own need. Henrik wanted so much to ask Søren Kierkegaard something, some vital question, but exactly what question it was he had to ask, just would not come to ...”

“... is actually a protest against Bashar al-Assad’s regime; government security forces may appear at any moment. My first two attempts to get to Qudsaya failed when armed police and militia showed up at the last minute and the demonstrations were cancelled. Along with Barzeh, a northeastern suburb of Damascus, Qudsaya is the nearest place to the ...”

“... perfunctory kisses’ and ‘breath that stank of beer and caries and onions’. The ‘au pair’ may have been a whitish lie.Trev wanted desperately to do the right thing by his housemaid, and it is not inconceivable that he was sent to the Hermitage – as she was sent ‘into London somewhere’ – to separate them. While he was at the Hermitage, he heard ...”

“... Anniversary of the Founding of the Republic. The fifth under German occupation, and we pray it may be the last. We’d been promised reinforcements today, waited all day, at last they came. What a crew – worse than useless. As far as I can tell they are Prague coffee-house Jews, the lot of them. They all speak Czech – of sorts (!). It does seem to have ...”

“... based more on his irrational hatred of England than on any natural Fascism; he and his wife may have been the only people in the whole of Norway who wanted Germany to ‘bring England to its knees’, as he madly implored in one wartime newspaper article. The heroes of Hamsun’s novels of the 1890s are wrongly seen, in most criticism, as ...”

“... The ghettoisation and sub-sequent deportation of Salonika’s Jews took place between February and May 1943, with one last train in August. What Waldheim knew or didn’t know is impossible to prove, but he wasn’t there. The French journalists did hit upon one interesting story that I had not seen published outside Austria before, which has to do with how ...”

“... it cost its composer before he was able to present it in its ‘final’ form in Vienna on 23 May 1814. It is the only work of its kind he ever completed; it caused him a great deal of pain; yet despite the attention he lavished on it, he failed to get the satisfaction from it, in terms either of popular success or of aesthetic conviction, that his ...”

“... in another odd reversal, I secretly wonder to myself whether the system of duties and deadlines may now save me, although I know that my illness creeps invisibly on, more secretly and insidiously than the time announced by my first watch, which I carried with so little awareness of how it numbered my mortality, divided it up into perfect, unchanging ...”

“... they make the first concessions to reform. Describing the first session of the Estates General, in May 1789, she notes: ‘One of those taking in the scene . . . was a young lawyer called Maximilien Robespierre.’ She adds no comment; the nodding and winking lie between the lines. A big finger from heaven is pointing at one small, singular man with a forked ...”