“... Retreating behind an increasingly baroque attempt to defer the question may have kept an uneasy peace in the party, but it prompted disbelief in a country rapidly evacuating the centre ground.Staffers interviewed in both books wonder if a clearer position after 2017 – accepting the referendum result, acknowledging the membership’s unease, backing a soft ...”

“... of the territory. But his plans for the British East Indies appeared to be at an end with the peace of 1814, when Britain returned most of its gains to the Netherlands in exchange for keeping the Cape of Good Hope and some minor territories in Latin America. In 1817, his glory days seemingly over, Raffles became the lieutenant-governor of Bencoolen, a ...”

“... democracy, internationalism, mutuality, jobs, education, food, housing, medicine, pensions, peace, friendship and love. But there is one strand of the tradition we prefer not to think about: the idea of putting an end to the wasteful chaos of capitalism by implementing a comprehensive economic plan. Central planning is usually associated with ...”

“... concept of sabr, or ‘patience’. The outbreak of the second intifada, in response to failed peace talks at Camp David in 2000 and Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to Temple Mount, wrong-footed Hamas. The leadership reacted by ramping up suicide bombings, but it was being led by events rather than leading them. The ...”

“... Day 1943: ‘One day we will have a great hurley match, or a great race meeting to celebrate peace and we will hold it outside Belfast to celebrate the return of the Six Counties.’ Or: ‘It is of no importance at all that the Tricolour should fly from the City Hall in Belfast instead of the Union Jack if Belfast workers are to find it as hard to live ...”

“... only TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’ On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who is Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby airport. It’s a giant mail ...”

“... myself to be part of an older world, where people lived and worked in a state of sentimental peace. All rot of course. But lovely rot. Sometimes I would come downstairs in the night and shine my torch on the painting.At one time it seemed as if all the farms around our way had been abandoned or pulled down to make room for housing. Past railway lines and ...”

“... he raised the knife at one of them. A magistrate bound him over for a year for breach of the peace; he was not referred to hospital. Clunis would have received more help, the Ritchie Report suggests, under a hospital order or through the Probation Services. In the Report’s view, victims should be encouraged to press charges in such situations. Having ...”

“... woman reading a love letter, or writing one, or just admiring herself in the glass), the inner peace of the pictures and the unassertiveness of the sitters, nearly all of them women, are so simple and direct that even two of Rembrandt’s most famous self-portraits, one at either end of his life, seem almost coarse by comparison. I’m sure it’s the ...”

“... of the postwar boom in the OECD zone by Anglo-American economists of the Left – Andrew Glyn, David Gordon and others – and totalised a phase of world history under it. The notion, as always and as he himself concedes, is a retrospective one: treasure discovered after the event. It is amid the rubble of the Landslide that what preceded it appear ...”

“... like the pockets of comic relief in Shakespearean tragedy. It is far larger and more defining. In David Hawkes’s translation of The Dream, an achievement surpassing Scott Moncrieff’s or later English versions of Proust in the art of delivering one cultural world – a much stranger one – into another, not only is the wit no barrier to an Anglophone ...”

“... mistress of General John Pershing and had helped break up the marriage of the British admiral Sir David Beattie. She was introduced to the glamorous young Superintendent. It was, in Perret’s view, a case of mutual and instantaneous lust. Others diagnosed the meshing of public images. The New York Times report of their wedding, on St Valentine’s Day ...”

“... do like reading other women, and seeing them properly recognised for their work.But it’s also, David Runciman reckons on his Talking Politics podcast, to do with the eventfulness of Arendt’s life, which is why Ken Krimstein’s comic-book biography of 2018 is structured around our heroine’s ‘Three Escapes’. Arendt did not arrive in the US until ...”

“... to the ‘public good’ or else to the Jewish people, where these sometimes seem to be the same. David Blumberg, chairman of the board of directors of the National Library, puts the case this way: ‘The library does not intend to give up on cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people … Because it is not a commercial institution and the items kept there ...”

“... families – are unhappy after their own fashion. Tolstoy wrote equally compellingly about war and peace. Literature is best suited for qualitative description, not quantitative accumulation. It isn’t an unhappiness contest, or an unhappiness-entitlement contest. The danger of Cisneros’s dig at her Iowa classmates, ‘cultivated in the finest schools in ...”