“... parrrrr la foule’ – ‘carried along by the rushing crowd’). She may be accusing the crowd with her words, but with her body and voice, she is seducing them. When her last word is done, she continues the story with gestures, dancing now, as if doing a mad farandole with the crowd, her eyes half-closed and her feet tapping. The ...”

“... in public interest terms, motives are generally mixed, only God can see into the heart etc. We may be on firmer ground making distinctions between denunciations on the basis of likely outcomes. Under Stalin during the Great Purges, these included arrest, exile to Gulag and summary execution. While the denunciatory processes of McCarthyism had some ...”

“... Wolf Messing achieved his celebrity in the Soviet Union during the Second World War, when he may or may not have met Stalin. After the war, he took his act to the circus and (like Bulgakov’s Woland) the variety theatre, both familiar territory for Soviet ‘mentalists’. During perestroika, Messing’s autobiography ...”

“... of great men.We need to straighten the record, not only for reasons of accuracy but because it may help us to understand better Franklin’s years of public service. For the characteristics of his political career – immersion in detail, alertness to the evidence, readiness to be corrected or converted, perseverance, intense practicality and extraordinary ...”

“... into our house, people say: ‘Do you come from Tinsel?’ And indeed, at the very crossroads, you may see the first front door standing open, in the Tinsel manner: not open wide, just fifteen inches or so, just enough to take the effort out of being nosy. At this age I have to decode the streets before they are safe to walk. It’s a snag that I can’t ...”

“... time,’ the station announced, ‘we shall speak to you about America and the war … The news may be good or bad – we shall tell you the truth.’ Since then, VOA has produced content in 83 languages and is one of the few independent sources of information available in China and Iran (it was blocked by Russia in 2022). ‘It’s just radical left crazy ...”

“... most of the tangible benefits.’In January 1977, Gandhi abruptly ended the dictatorship. ‘We may never know for sure’ what prompted her to call an election, Raghavan writes, but it may be clearer than he thinks: she went to the polls because she thought she could win. As it was, the opposition came together, uniting ...”

“... for all to see; the danger of chaos on a vast scale is evident. Yet what seems bound to happen may not. The country still seems to work. The staples are somehow delivered; connections, corruption and crime supply the luxuries to many; there is plenty of public transport; the apartment blocks are crowded, but in winter they are warm; the freeing of public ...”

“... as a prominent member of the Hausa-Fulani aristocracy. Having been persuaded to spare him, Abacha may have felt that clemency for the Ogoni Nine would be interpreted as a sign of weakness by the military, the only group capable of deposing him. It was, in any case, a measure of Abacha’s growing confidence that he used the pretext of Yar’Adua’s ...”

“... of Younger Women and Younger Men. Among the gals: Lily de Rême, the flirty, capricious model for May in the 1913 novel L’Entrave, about a bisexual ménage à trois; Musidora, the early cinema star (and one-time mistress of Willy) who became famous as the kohl-eyed darling of the Surrealists; the promiscuous salonnière Natalie Barney (‘the Pope of ...”

“... a sweatbox, a spell trapped on a desert island. The bizarre thing is that for Simenon they may also have represented a welcome easing-off and slackening of the pace: during the hack period of his early twenties, he would work every day until he had written eighty typed pages. Then he’d throw up. That’s how you write 150 books in seven years.The ...”

“... of this terrible disjuncture produces denialism of many kinds, and through that gap the far right may find an entry point. The old fascist formula, ‘we say what you’re really thinking,’ authorises an escape from hypocrisy: ‘we think what your behaviour really implies.’A century ago, Clara Zetkin – the Marxist theorist after whom the collective is ...”

“... own work. Critical reception has an effect on their judgment, as does simple perversity; and they may affect to love the most overlooked of their progeny. Thus Evelyn Waugh used to claim that his favourite novel was Helena. Though Salammbô was a greater financial and social success than Madame Bovary – it became a meme, and the inspiration for ballgowns ...”

“... girls who had skived off school to shout obscenities about Blair’s decision to go to war. In May 1978 it was the assembly point for the seven thousand Bangladeshis who marched behind Ali’s coffin to Downing Street. Young people in the area were beginning to distance themselves from their parents, whom they had come to see as passive. Their mothers were ...”

“... but it has failed to address some of the worst healthcare disparities in the world – and what may well be the highest global rates of childhood malnutrition and stunting. In An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions, Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen consider the plight of hundreds of millions of Indians who still live in poverty, often as a consequence ...”