“... supervision, state torture has become so commonplace that Human Rights Watch recently concluded it may amount to a crime against humanity; all protest has been rendered effectively illegal, extrajudicial killings have soared and the number of political prisoners is believed to exceed sixty thousand. The government has censored hundreds of websites and drafted ...”

“... to speak was attacked by Communist Party goons and one of his friends badly injured.On 15 May 1946, a year before his death, he suffered what may have been a mild heart attack. ‘I was suddenly seized by one of those oppressive dizzy spells that have been striking me very frequently of late, and which weaken me to ...”

“... since the Fall of the Wall. If the best way to make sense of the seventy years of the Soviet Union may be as an episode – a destabilising interim – in the order of warring nation-states, then a comparison with Napoleon inevitably crops up. How well, we might ask, roughly thirty years after Waterloo, had ‘Europe’ succeeded in managing the memory of the ...”

“... the whole thing in a proper chronological order, not like this mish-mash I’m making you.’ He may only be a literary construct, but his instincts are sound. Postmodernism as Chabon practises it is a laminate of uncertainty and overconfidence, a formula for taking risks that is actually pretty safe. Think the jumbled chronology works? Great. Think it ...”

“... three-million dollar extravaganza held at a five-star hotel in Sun City, South Africa, in May 2013. Two hundred guests arrived from New Delhi on a chartered Airbus that was allowed to land at a nearby military airbase. Vega’s uncle Atul Gupta met the guests, who were taken to the resort without any passport or visa checks. One hundred and thirty ...”

“... fewer artillery strikes on the city than in the east of the country. But there are signs that this may be changing. On 14 March, an artillery strike hit an apartment building in the Obolon district. Another residential building in the west of the city was hit on 15 March. On 20 March, a missile hit a shopping centre, killing eight people. Most of the defences ...”

“... from the Ministry of Home Safety.’ Plastic straps seem unlikely for this period, though this may be a fault of Adrian Nathan West’s translation. He could certainly have done better with the ‘Ministry of Home Safety’. Such an institution would presumably concern itself with such things as electrical insulation and the flammability of soft ...”

“... sum. The contract for Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1667 paid him two instalments of £5 and may have got his widow a further £8. The average annual income for an agricultural labourer in 1710 was a little over £17, and a solicitor at that time might earn around £113 a year. Pope published his Works in 1717, something which no English poet under ...”

“... epochal shift, marked by brutality, regime change and massive enforced population movement. On 6 May 1527 the Spanish, German and Italian troops of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, sacked the city, assaulting and slaughtering its citizens, pillaging and violating sacred spaces and objects. The level of violence reported in eyewitness accounts ...”

“... the rest of us. Certain writers’ books get ‘fenced off by enthusiasts, and the casual reader may feel the need of credentials to read them’. Between 1956 and 1981 Mary Renault published eight novels set in ancient Greece that made her enormously, wildly popular. These days, though she’s never been out of print – this is the second reissue of her ...”

“... Antigone’. It is one thing to be Antigone to one’s father, but to be Antigone to his Movement may have been a distraction for Anna as well as a destiny. Oedipus, after all, did not start a new profession. Freud managed to live virtually half his life – what he came to think of as the most significant half – without psychoanalysis. Anna lived her whole ...”

“... is only one. Moreover, rather than becoming stronger during the interim period, the Palestinians may grow weaker, come more under the Israeli thumb, and therefore be less able to dispute the Israeli claim when the last set of negotiations begins. But on the matter of how, by what specific mechanism, to get from an interim status to a later one, the document ...”

“... read one of Wittgenstein’s discussions of philosophical illusions, there are two things which we may not find it easy to hold together in our minds simultaneously, his success in dispelling them and the depth and difficulty of the problems that produced them.’ In this second volume of a formidable two-volume study, Pears tries to provide access to ...”

“... it had ample reason for satisfaction with the fundamental norms of international Order. That may well be the main reason why the moment passed without producing disaster. I suppose, however, that one should not altogether discount the reassuring Reagan persona, the tranquillising effect of a few hundred billion additional dollars spent on defence, the ...”

“... If I had to make such a choice I suppose I’d help university students.     Brown: May God forgive you. The vote went 11-10 in favour of postponement for two years. Since this would ensure fresh cohorts of the underprivileged for Jennie Lee’s new Open University to recruit, one could argue that Brown set up a false opposition. But nothing ...”