“... 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 ...”

“... by Tom Wolfe); called on a generation to abandon conventional striving, was casual about drug laws, went to Mexico, went to jail, and went back to the land in Oregon. In time he picked up writing again, but the old fire was extinct. Stone and Kesey, although close friends, were completely different writers. Stone sought clarity and precision, Kesey strove ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... regime in which black and brown bodies could be seized, broken and destroyed outside all norms and laws of war – are coming to grips with ‘America’s Original Sin: Slavery and the Legacy of White Supremacy’ (an unlikely recent headline in Foreign Affairs). Back in the early 2000s the liberal universalists seemed unaware that their project might be ...”

“... Thiel dreams of immortality. Many tech billionaires do not believe they should be bound by the laws of nations or biology, and apparently want to continue consuming an outsize amount of the world’s resources indefinitely. ‘I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every ...”

“... in Whitman, just as Whitman’s many early admirers in England had done, like Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds, who seemed primarily taken with his poetry because it spoke for and to gay men like themselves. He is at his frequent best, however, when his poetry is least negotiable in the hands of people who read it on the look-out for what they hope ...”

“... them of encouraging it. That year, under the leadership of the anti-Semitic former neo-Nazi John Tyndall, the Front launched a racist campaign aimed at schoolchildren called How to Spot a Red Teacher: ‘You can recognise them when they sneer at our White race and nation and everything that has made Britain great.’ In view of Ukip’s insistence that ...”

“... Harper.The relationship began to break down in the 1990s. In 1992 Ken Clarke, home secretary under John Major, announced an ambitious plan to reform policing. He described the police to Harper as ‘the last great unreformed Victorian public service’: excessively bureaucratic (the Met most of all, with five senior ranks of officer rather than the usual ...”

“... which were harming Americans’ lungs and disfiguring their cities. Americans dislike restrictive laws and love markets. The upshot was an ingenious scheme of emission trading, within the US only, modelled on the system of ‘air rights’ in New York and other big cities, whereby the owners of low-rise buildings can sell the unoccupied space overhead to ...”

“... that Roosevelt had had a change of heart. French expatriates in Washington, notably the poet Saint-John Perse, talked down De Gaulle; Washington’s envoy to Vichy, Robert Murphy, briefed hard against him; but perhaps the president drew his own conclusions from the disastrous Anglo-French assault on Dakar in the autumn of 1940, undertaken at De Gaulle’s ...”