“... concept was revealed to the world, years later, as the Millennium Dome. But, like his namesake Dr John, the Elizabethan magus and imperial geographer, Simon Dee was exploited by the Secret State and then abandoned to provincial obscurity. Now it can be told: the Dome represents the consciousness of the lost years of Simon Dee. Finally, on Friday 12 ...”

“... forehead at the front, the flukes at the back – and even in the middle. Melville tells us that John D’Wolf, one of his uncles, was in charge of a ship raised clean out of the water by a whale slipping beneath it and then ‘setting up its back’. During his time on the Essex, Owen Chase had a similar experience in one of the ship’s boats, when a whale ...”

“... traced from Coleridge through writers as different as Charlotte Brontë, whose cold missionary St John Rivers is plainly Evangelical; through Dickens’s Chadband, insisting on telling the ‘Terewth’; through Samuel Butler’s Pontifex and right up to the present moment, where David Hare’s Racing Demon (a tragedy of the Church) has two Judases, one a ...”

“... hospitals in unmarked vans, and unloaded at back entrances. I heard about despair. I heard General John Abizaid, commander of US Central Command, say of the insurgents: ‘I don’t think that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away ...”

“... demilitarised airport at Heathrow, and making her own way with her small belongings to her in-laws’ flat in South Kensington, on the first floor of a mansion block between several bomb sites. It was 1945, and supplies were thin: my grandmother lay in her bed to keep warm under her crimpled eiderdown, longing for sweets (and other stimulants). Emilia ...”

“... view. And yet, for the next fifty years there were few reports on these seemingly uncharted lands. John Gunther’s bestselling 1949 memoir, Death Be Not Proud, about the death from cancer of his brilliant 17-year-old son, is a notable exception. Then, by the end of the 20th century, book-length accounts of illness were suddenly everywhere: more than thirty ...”

“... of irreversibility, nonlinearity and even discontinuity, but they cannot serve as scientific laws, as Marx and especially Engels thought. By contrast, the opposition between local and global rationality remains of fundamental importance. One might argue, of course, that this idea has by now become so thoroughly absorbed into mainstream social science ...”

“... system helps rather than hinders economic growth on the neo-liberal model, by ensuring that labour laws, trade unions, the legislature, the judiciary and the fear of environmental destruction do not impede the privatisation of state assets, the appropriation of agricultural land, the provision of subsidies and tax cuts to businessmen, or the concentration of ...”

“... anyone can stop us.’ So two hundred of us marched out onto the streets – totally against the laws – and went to the American Consulate and Government House, chanting slogans in favour of Lumumba. Nothing happened – no police, nothing. Our demo was photographed, so we got some coverage; and on the way back to the college, emboldened by what we’d ...”

“... states such as Ukraine have no choice but to submit to the nearest great power, has run its course.John Mearsheimer’s argument of recent weeks that what we are seeing played out is ‘not imperialism [but] great-power politics’ will strike many as a distinction without a difference. Imperial history has far more to teach us than our decaying Atlantic ...”

“... up in the Ottoman East – they were immediately made to renounce them by Papal edict. Medieval laws often required that social outcasts – thieves, traitors, prostitutes, lepers, madmen, hangmen – wear garish striped garments; in illuminated books, Biblical malefactors such as Judas and Cain were regularly depicted in striped robes and breeches. Stripes ...”

“... and beside himself with anxiety about how to look after his six remaining children and his in-laws. How he didn’t buckle under the weight of his circumstances, how he remained unbroken by such pain and loss, how, despite it all, he kept writing, would seem almost a miracle of fortitude were it not for the suspicion that his creative life required him to ...”

“... of her first novel behind her, Bedford got a contract to write an entire book about the trial of John Bodkin Adams – the Harold Shipman of his time – at the Old Bailey that year. The book begins with the judge’s entrance, ‘trailing a wake of subtlety, of secret powers, age’ and ends three and a half weeks later with the not guilty verdict. In ...”

“... behaviourist tradition that came to dominate American psychology in the 20th century, pioneered by John B. Watson after the First World War and later identified with B.F. Skinner, was established with the explicit aim of rendering human responses predictable and thereby controllable. Psychology would abandon any theory of mind in favour of data on observable ...”

“... Democrats have reason to style themselves as a party of order, which also must mean obedience to laws, since they are depending on the courts and the intelligence community to save the country from Trump – depending on them, indeed, with a simple fervour that approaches the condition of prayer. And yet for some time, going back as far as the summer of ...”