“... escape a tsarist Russification scheme that centred on drafting eligible young Jewish men into the Army for 25-year terms of military service. I know that the Russian Government lurched between wanting to isolate Jews in a carefully demarcated Pale of Settlement, as if they were a dangerous virus, and wanting to swallow and absorb them by destroying their ...”

“... money. I gave him some change and the rest of the Golden Virginia. He stood up, nodded, slid his arms into the long coat and walked off. An attendant, patrolling the path, strode up and told me to get rid of the bottle. And he hoped I wasn’t begging: ‘this isn’t the place.’ I pulled my hood up and made off, slipping between the charging ...”

“... and profits. An orgy of household borrowing, largely against the collateral represented by private homes, enabled the ‘almighty consumer’ temporarily to save the day. But this binge came at the cost of a new bubble in the housing market, and is likely to have only a brief half-life. Justified by 9/11 and a faltering economy – not to mention the failure ...”

“... injuring 70, and at Woolwich a month later when a bomb, thrown through a window of the King’s Arms, went off and killed two customers. Bevan then told the jury that Paddy Armstrong had been one of several people detained in December 1974 in connection with the bombings. Armstrong was central to this trial because the documents at the heart of the Crown ...”

“... futile rebellion. Richard II is rowed downstream to confront Wat Tyler and his peasant army. Unable to call on anything as formidable as the Metropolitan Police’s Territorial Support Group, the boy king refuses to step ashore. ‘Rough, rude men’ had been sent ‘all over the country’ to gather the iniquitous poll tax and the mood was ...”

“... the 1st Battalion of the Coldstream Guards were operating out of Camp Abu Naji, it was the British army that had become the enemy of the people. Mortar attacks on the base were just part of the general grief, a handful of dust to be thrown regularly in the face of the occupying forces. Anthony Wakefield, aged 24, had a long memory of night-time patrols. He had ...”

“... a model’, as Gopnik puts it: Warhol’s soup cans were ‘the household gods of modern American homes’. Duchamp weighed in: ‘If you take a Campbell’s Soup can and repeat it fifty times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put fifty Campbell’s Soup cans on a canvas.’ One of the virtues of the ...”

“... way of killing everyone in it, or of levelling it to the ground. It’s not the tactic of an army set on presenting itself as a liberator. It is, however, quite a good way of terrorising and demoralising people. And if a country with a large arsenal of such missiles set itself the task of slowly crushing a city, factory by factory, shopping centre by ...”

“... mind any number of comparable stories familiar to these jurors: of the men accused of bombing the homes and churches of the ministers who led the Montgomery bus boycott – a capital crime in Alabama at the time – two were acquitted despite making signed confessions and the rest were simply not charged. Perhaps, too, William Brooks’s heart-wrenchingly ...”

“... Victoria under their coats, usually in a scarf fashioned into a sling, sometimes held in their arms. But Little claimed that on 7 January, after they had first bought and then quickly disposed of a buggy, they placed her in the bag where she was found after her death:It would appear that, at this time, the child was transferred to a red reinforced Lidl ...”

“... it realised that Corbyn might be contemplating the kind of pivot described above, has risen in arms to preserve its essential City connection. What will remain of Labour as a result is not clear. Not much, by the look of it. A columnist in the Financial Times – always a good read when markets are roiling – reminds his constituency that ‘financial ...”

“... through thin air and Maureen, having broken its fall at the last moment, now has it in her arms as though it had been there all along. Colin, who is wearing a bowler hat and leather gloves and earning £1200 a year on the London Stock Exchange, looks as if he’d just got away with an ingenious robbery. Secrecy was paramount. As far as Colin’s ...”

“... Fatmir. He had taught Albanian in a private school in his village; he was also a Kosovo Liberation Army supporter: fair game for the Serbians and an asylum-seeker who could expect success under the terms of the 1951 Convention. In 1998, soon after his village was bombarded and the school burned down, he joined an exodus of KLA from the province. They were ...”