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“... to conspiracy’, together with a capacity for ‘cautious, patient planning’, emerged at a young age. Such a prudent approach to political violence seems to have been rare in Syria at the time. During the Sixties, coups generally took the form of a daylight attack on the Army headquarters and the Damascus radio station, or a tank assault on the prime ...”

“... the glass. In Tennessee, he noted that the people had elected to Congress ‘an individual called David Crockett, who had received no education, could read only with difficulty, had no property, no fixed dwelling, but spent … his whole life in the woods’. Yet Alexis de Tocqueville also found America ‘a most interesting and instructive country to ...”

“... from the police in all these videos: disbelief, rage, grief, the recognition that yet another young black man has been killed. The video transforms an excruciating personal disaster, a private moment, into a public and political event. If we are not police or prosecutors, not a member of a community-relations group or a public commission on violence; if ...”

“... is Ní Chuilleanáin so drawn to them? There’s a clue in ‘J’ai mal à nos dents’, when a young nun visiting the dentist in Calais uses the first-person plural to describe her teeth. To take religious orders is to surrender one’s individuality to communal life. Later in the poem, she lifts the older nuns onto a pig cart as they flee from the ...”

“... wrote The Fountain of Bakchisarai, an Orientalist fantasy of opulence, despots and harems, with ‘young captives’ who ‘frolic in cool pools’. Most Russian imperial administrators saw their Tatar subjects as backward, uncivilised and potentially dangerous to the strategically sensitive Black Sea coast. During Russia’s numerous wars with the Sublime ...”

“... Fifty-eight years ago the man we now know as Sir David McNee was born in dire poverty in a Glasgow tenement. His father was a railwayman, and a staunch tradeunionist who rose ‘through a variety of jobs’ to be driver of many famous trains, including the ‘Royal Scot’. His mother was the daughter of a railwayman ...”

“... what they want, a Democrat has to: that was his line. Hillary Clinton also backed the generals, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal and the chief of staff Admiral Mullen, in their request for 40,000 more troops. Indeed she supported them more strongly than Gates did. Jones sought to help Obama by running interference with the Pentagon, but Obama preferred ...”

“... of torture in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). When, at the emotional climax of Disgrace (1999), David Lurie embraces his daughter to comfort her following her gang rape by three men, she is described as ‘stiff as a pole’. Long after she knows his name, Beatriz insists on thinking of Witold as ‘the Pole’: it’s one of the ways she has of keeping him ...”

“... of ‘undesirables’ in the summer of 1940 included nearly ten thousand women, hundreds with young children. Several were well known: Hannah Arendt; Dora Benjamin, Walter’s sister; Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of Lion; the actress Dita Parlö, whose character falls in love with Jean Gabin’s in La Grande Illusion; Lisa Fittko, a passeuse who risked her ...”

“... Fanny Hill (1748-9), the device of allowing an older, experienced whore to instruct an eager young novice in all the intimate details of her sexual expertise, was a stock ingredient of male sexual fantasy. Lynn Hunt sees in such narrative devices not merely a kind of voyeuristic stereotyping, but the subversive potential of a forbidden genre in which ...”

“... In a striking passage in his memoirs Richard Baxter recalls watching the battle of Langport as a young chaplain in the army of the Parliament. After some fierce fighting, panic suddenly set in among the Royalists on the opposite hill. Standing next to Baxter was the godly Major Thomas Harrison. As the Cavaliers broke and fled, Baxter heard him ‘with a loud voice break forth into the praises of God with fluent expressions, as if he had been in a rapture ...”

“... so close. His strategy, which was to concentrate on turning out ‘natural’ Democrats – the young, the college-educated, the metropolitan, the non-white – in sufficient numbers to overwhelm his opponent, was probably always destined to come up short against a well-oiled Republican machine. But demographic destiny appears to favour the Democrats in the ...”

“... less likely to wait out a democratic crisis than countries where it is in the thirties or above. Young people, especially young men, are impatient and reckless; older people are more willing to give things time. The median age in Greece is 42.5, and in Italy it’s 43.5, one of the highest figures in the world (for ...”

“... were in attendance, nor any celebrities, not even the local music critic. It was enough that young and old thronged into, and overflowed from, the great St Magnus Church in Brunswick for a Friedenskonzert conducted by the gifted and resourceful young Kantor, Matthias Stanze. Like Berlin’s Gedächniskirche and ...”

“... between the security of his home life and the discrimination he experienced out in the world as a young Black man. But he also struggled with the choices he faced as someone who could make an outlandish living in a variety of different sports. His coaches, parents and friends all encouraged him to play professional baseball. He was one of the top-rated ...”