“... I’m a liar.’ These are the opening words of an amazing play by Anne Carson, first performed in 2019. The statement is in one sense correct. The speaker is nowhere near Egypt and about three thousand years too late for the Trojan War. J.L. Austin listed being ‘said by an actor on the stage’ as one of the ways in which an utterance might be ‘hollow or ...”

“... fashions in pottery, for instance – or circumstantial, like an ancient DNA study published in 2019 showing that some unfortunate infants buried at Ashkelon in the 12th century bce had a foreign father or grandfather. But pots aren’t people, and the Levant has always been busy with sailors, traders and migrants who mixed easily with local ...”

“... school and recognised a parable when I saw one.By the time my mother’s second husband died last January, dust clung to the model’s slackened rigging like sea fog. There was no room for it in her new flat, so my husband and I agreed to take it to our house in Glasgow. I posted a photograph of it on Twitter and in less than an hour received a message from ...”

“... 1938, the people around me were more conscious of a similar measure enacted by Vladimir Putin in 2019, which led to the debilitation of civil society in Russia. Word had spread that the authorities had quietly moved forward the vote on the new law.Everyone seems to know everyone else in Tbilisi, as was clear from cheerful reunions happening all around ...”

“... not just a contractual obligation, but a covenant before God? (Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019.)Instead she became ‘increasingly erratic’, which Vance sometimes seems to suggest is the plight of all single parents. Once, in the car with her, ‘she sped up to what seemed like a hundred miles per hour and told me that she was going to crash the car ...”

“... in breach of human rights. This trend has gathered pace since I wrote about it in the LRB of 27 January 2022. I concentrated there on the court’s powerful president, Lord Reed, and he remains by far the most important influence, but other justices have joined in: Reed led in neither of the cases just mentioned. None of this is being done in secret – the ...”

“... of Adolfo’s older brother, Paul, who successfully petitioned the Argentine consul in Paris. In January 1944, they were released. ‘Why us, and why not them?’ Adolfo wondered. In Paris, he bought chemistry books from bouquinistes along the Seine and taught himself to make explosives. But when a man known as Penguin (aka Marc Hamon) recruited him for the ...”

“... among French Muslims in the republican principles they’re endlessly instructed to observe. In 2019 the findings of an Ifop (Institut français d’opinion publique) poll, commissioned by a government anti-discrimination committee, suggested a far higher incidence of ‘verbal aggression’ against Muslim than non-Muslim French (24 per cent to 9), and more ...”

“... last summer, was damning. A committee member observed that, had the findings been known in 2019, von der Leyen could never have become commission president. (One of the less noticed effects of the continuous grand coalitions in Berlin is that ministers pay no political price for even the most egregious mistakes, as a consequence of non-aggression pacts ...”

“... Regina, the successful novelist in her mid-thirties. In the resourcefully slippery Trust Exercise (2019), it’s Sarah, the teenage drama student; later we meet Sarah, the successful 30-year-old novelist. There’s the ghost of the same pattern in Flashlight: Louisa, the whip-smart damaged child; then, briefly, Louisa, the middle-aged, twice-married ...”

“... remedy for designing a redistricting map that sews up the outcome of a congressional election. In 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that although the Supreme Court ‘does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering’, any court-mandated intervention in district maps would inevitably look partisan and impugn the court’s neutrality. In ...”

“... fact that SBF wasn’t a believer didn’t mean that he wasn’t good at trading crypto. By January 2018, Alameda had capital of $40 million and was making half a million dollars every day. This early success allowed SBF and Wang to raise more money, and soon they had $170 million, mainly from rich members of the EA community. (You might have thought ...”

“... a different patron: the Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was assassinated in January by American drones while travelling in a convoy with his patron, Qasim Soleimani. Swiping further, and with a certain amount of pride, she showed me pictures of herself torturing people and desecrating the bodies of her enemies. In one, she raised a fist ...”

“... In​ 2019, all four artists nominated for the Turner Prize – Helen Cammock, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani – shared the award, not at the instigation of the judges but at the request of the artists themselves, who asked to be considered as a collective rather than individual entrants, ‘in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity ...”

“... of Putin after the invasion of Ukraine or Beijing’s clampdown in Hong Kong after 2019). But states that have a real claim to be democracies are also enacting new restrictions, targeting people, possessions and proclamations. In Bavaria, climate protesters were locked up for thirty days so that the Munich Motor Show could proceed ...”