“... better than a Trojan horse for American domination of Europe, de Gaulle vetoed the application in January 1963.The following year, Labour came to power in London. Before his death, Hugh Gaitskell had rallied the party to vigorous opposition to British entry into the EEC, arguing that it would mean the end of a thousand years as an independent nation. Harold ...”

“... pathway that underlies this phenomenon won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2019. One of them was Peter Ratcliffe, the clinical research director of the Francis Crick Institute, where I work. He began his Nobel lecture by presenting some of the data Fitzgerald collected.There is much still to discover about the physiology of oxygen ...”

“... Voices of the Lost came to attention after winning the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2019. It consists of five loosely intertwined narratives, related in haste by unnamed exiles from an unnamed Arabic country living in Europe (or what we assume to be Europe – it’s never quite spelled out). Each letter is abandoned by its writer and discovered ...”

“... from the postwar era has greatly weakened, however. A fifth of the new Conservative MPs elected in 2019 previously worked in lobbying or public relations. We also know that the greater an MP’s adherence to economic libertarianism, the more likely they are to cross the line. Boris Johnson’s cabinet is comprised of his party’s most committed economic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In spring​ 2019 I stood in a meadow outside the small Ukrainian town of Mostyska, squinting at a transliteration of the Mourner’s Kaddish on my phone. A local farmer had directed my guide towards a couple of stubs of rock, the only remnants of dozens of gravestones that had long ago been removed for use as building materials ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”