“... real, current 37 follows a South London route, between Putney Heath and Peckham.) The number may also have something to do with Leah’s biological clock. Her husband Michel wants children, but she doesn’t. The couple met in Ibiza in ‘the Nineties, ecstatic decade!’ and their faded hedonism makes Leah nostalgic. Michel is West African via France, a ...”

“... optimism and threw herself into bolstering the confidence of her husband and of the country. In May 1939 Bertie, now George VI, became the first British monarch to visit the United States, on a tour intended to pave the way for a future alliance against Germany. There is a glimpse of the extremes the new queen was attempting to draw together in a letter ...”

“... In The City of Dreadful Night, James Thomson’s narrator prowls ‘lonely streets/Where one may count up every face he meets’. This is what the metropolitan insomniac does instead of counting sheep. For J. Alfred Prufrock, faces are masks – ‘there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’ – and in The Waste Land these ...”

“... now says she saw him write it (she also says the Russian secret services are following her). It may or may not be true. But it was Berezovsky’s final role: prodigal ...”

“... the cholera, but Haiti is awash in rumours. The Minustah press release denying responsibility ‘may have seemed like damage control’, Katz writes, but it had the opposite effect. The morning after it was issued, Katz and his fixer, Evens Sanon, discovered visibly unsanitary conditions and a stench at the base: broken pipes were releasing what looked like ...”

“... joke is typical of Chaucer, and it isn’t the only time he remarks on his chubbiness, but it may also express a kind of phonic national modesty. Italian is an easier language in which to fly than English. It has a higher frequency of liquid consonants, and rhymes come so easily that it’s sometimes difficult to stem their flow. The main translations of ...”

“... is not harmony, as Treadwell had wilfully supposed, but ‘chaos, hostility and murder’. It may not have been quite that simple. The only way Treadwell could conceal from himself the abstractness of his love for the bears was to create around them an equal and opposite abstraction, also masquerading as real: a vision, precisely, of the universe as ...”

“... and despairingly insisted on his own contribution to that struggle. The war, he told Ada in May 1943, following the dambuster raid that drowned the Möhne valley, was becoming a ‘Jews’ war’. As late as the Ardennes Offensive of December 1944 the Noldes were glued to their radio, hoping for an Endsieg and railing against Germany’s racial ...”

“... in 2016, and 111 killed and almost 2500 injured in 822 attacks in 2017.Modi was re-elected in May last year. On 5 August, the government stripped Jammu and Kashmir of statehood, dividing it into two separate territories, thus violating not only the state constitution but the Indian constitution as well. Jammu and Kashmir was the only Muslim majority state ...”

“... to a madrasa in Pakistan, where he intended to memorise the Quran. His parents heard from him in May 2001; he told them he wanted to move somewhere cooler for the summer. In December that year he was among a group of soldiers captured by the Northern Alliance: he had been training with al-Qaida and serving as a guard for the Taliban. Distanced from the ...”

“... neglect of specific territories or constituencies resulting in unforeseen explosions of dissent. May 1968 is the clearest instance of the latter, but both models have remained in evidence: examples include the rejection of Mitterrand’s attempted reform of private schools in 1984, the demonstrations against Juppé’s welfare reforms in 1995, the revolts of ...”

“... away from home. That she also proved a devoted wife and mother changes nothing. Domestic claims may have weighed on her and limited her freedom, but they never crippled it. Scholars have long agreed that Stowe drew much of her political and social vision from her sense of the superiority of domestic relations over those of the marketplace that increasingly ...”

“... away from the home of his children and his ex-wife?’ To those familiar with Lacan’s work, it may come as no surprise that he could be vexing and cocksure – a womaniser. But what A Father does reveal is Lacan’s avarice and his tendency to treat those of a lower social class – he referred to them as ‘subalterns’ – with contempt. He was rude to ...”

“... models abroad to be followed and traditions at home to be honoured or discarded. The framing may take years, as one draft is discredited or superseded by another. Each part of each scheme has to fit the rest in a sort of working engine of process and constraint. That surely requires expertise. But how is constitutional expertise reconciled with the ...”

“... more violent display of anger, and was more than ever determined to march against Hellas.’ We may suspect a calculated public display here. The purpose of the Persian expedition had been to inflict what was held to be justified punishment for the arson and sacrilege at Sardis, and these offences were still unavenged. It is very likely though that Darius ...”