“... a girl improver. Instead, there’s this:Competitive chess is a different story. One basic reason may be that a woman’s time tends to be cut into more. But mainly it’s just fashion and tradition. Young girls generally just don’t study chess seriously, as many boys do. The very few who do so have considerable success.A pocket book on chess isn’t the ...”

“... translated into English as In Northern Mists – Nansen proposed that Pytheas may have sailed north from Shetland with a south-westerly wind and a favourable current towards the north-east, and have arrived off the coast of Norway in the Romsdal or Nordmøre district, where the longest day of the year was of 21 hours . . . From here he ...”

“... was perfectly orthodox: as the chief justice had put it, ‘there is no law whatsoever but may be dispensed with by the supreme lawgiver,’ and the laws were constitutionally the king’s laws. Although the Convention Parliament’s Declaration of Rights denounced the dispensing power as unlawful, the real objection was to the use James had made of ...”

“... what goes on in our heads knowable, legible and marketable. Facebook’s capacity for surveillance may be unparalleled, but its interest in measuring, monitoring and managing our feelings isn’t. Psychologists and behavioural economists gather data about feelings from a range of sources, online and off, in an effort to understand and better predict people’s ...”

“... of British television as a platform for republican propaganda, the pithiest summary of its record may have come from the unionist politician Jeffrey Donaldson in 1993: ‘Sinn Féin do get a fairly bad press. You get the occasional documentary from Channel 4 which we would argue is not helpful in that at times it tries to present Sinn Féin as a rational ...”

“... celebrities (referred to by netizens as ‘little fresh meat’), and one of its next projects may well be to tame them. Sing and dance for the party! (And if you don’t, your appearances in public will be rare.)Managing domestic issues – social media, traditional media and security enforcement – is not the only measure of a successful party ...”

“... on the grounds that they reward the effort handsomely. But the same is true of manuscripts.Cotton may not have known what he had. His librarian, Richard James, labelled the manuscript: ‘Vetus poema Anglicanum in quo sub insomnii figmento multa ad religionem et mores spectantia explicantur’ (a poem in old English explaining many religious and moral topics ...”

“... but the unforeseen consequence of social and economic disaster. The poorer half of the population may end up, after a war or a plague, with a larger relative share of the national income and wealth, but only at the cost of surviving a catastrophe. It seems that the only satisfaction they stand to gain from such levelling events is the thin gruel of ...”

“... What​ you can paint depends on what you are allowed to see, which may be controlled by regulation or social convention. So, for instance, at the Paris Opéra in the 1870s, women were not under any circumstances permitted to sit in the orchestre. And they could only sit in the parterre, or rear stalls, if accompanied by a man ...”

“... At the time Washington was threatening Pakistan with sanctions for its work on the bomb, and Zia may have calculated that low-level nuclear co-operation with Iran could be used as a negotiating chip to be traded in later: the co-operation could always be ended if sanctions looked imminent, as a way of averting the threat.So the general, always adept at ...”

“... on class privilege’ had been transmuted into ‘untrammelled and misogynous violence’. This may have played a part in Hayes’s disappearance from public view; certainly his dislike of self-promotion didn’t help. But in the 1950s his unsentimental prose was widely admired – especially in Britain. Angus Wilson, Julian Maclaren-Ross and Francis ...”

“... with ‘meat, fish, fruit or vegetables’ and fail to mention other ingredients on which a curry may be based, such as paneer, the universal cheese of India?The most striking omission of all from the OED definition is India itself (though the section on etymology notes the word’s Tamil origins: ‘Tamil kari sauce, relish for rice, Kannada karil, whence ...”

“... demand for organic products and inform supermarket managers’ purchasing policies. Listeners may discern Harvey’s organic sympathies in the storyline of the soap – though there are often counter-arguments for balance, in good BBC style. And grass gets into just about everything in The Archers: even Brian Aldridge’s current infidelity was ...”

“... which deals with extramarital sexual intercourse, stipulates ‘imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years or a fine or both’. In the second place, it was illegal for the same judge to retry his own case in the absence of a judicial review. Unfortunately, this cavalier approach is the norm in the area courts in the North. Husseini was ...”

“... moments come when the Millbank machine tries to whip in its oldest member, reducing him in May 1999 to writing ‘fuck’ for the first time in a diary entry, and inducing nightmares involving Tony Blair as a parking warden. How times have changed. In 1975, Harold Wilson put a temporary halt to Benn’s leftward march by moving him from Industry to ...”