“... of Putin after the invasion of Ukraine or Beijing’s clampdown in Hong Kong after 2019). But states that have a real claim to be democracies are also enacting new restrictions, targeting people, possessions and proclamations. In Bavaria, climate protesters were locked up for thirty days so that the Munich Motor Show could proceed ...”

“... on the Kintyre peninsula in Scotland, made towers for Hornsea One. But it shut down in 2019 after its owners said they couldn’t turn a profit. In a small town with diminishing opportunities, a hundred people lost their jobs. It’s a familiar story: small British firm loses out to cheaper products made by low-paid workers overseas. Then again it ...”

“... Robert​ Reed became president of the United Kingdom Supreme Court on 13 January 2020, succeeding Lady Hale. By the end of 2021, the Supreme Court had produced 111 judgments since his appointment, 53 in 2020 and 58 in 2021, with Lord Reed himself sitting in 56 of these cases. These decisions give us an opportunity to assess how his Supreme Court is performing in the current malign political atmosphere ...”

“... mismanaged and looted by Zupta front organisations. The airline declared bankruptcy in 2019.Strategic consultants at McKinsey & Company were also implicated in the undermining of South African Airways. Among the charges levelled by the Zondo report is ‘the use of external service providers when there were already ably qualified and skilled staff ...”

“... by Russian human rights activists who investigated the circumstances of Sergei’s murder’.In 2019, Der Spiegel published an article by Benjamin Bidder, its former Moscow correspondent, headlined ‘The Case of Magnitsky: Questions Cloud Story behind US Sanctions’. ‘Ten years after his death,’ Bidder writes, ‘inconsistencies in Magnitsky’s story ...”

“... and declining life expectancy in the most deprived parts of the United Kingdom. Between 2012 and 2019, austerity was responsible for an estimated 335,000 excess deaths. The rate of prescription of antidepressants in England has doubled since 2011: nearly 20 per cent of adults now take them. The average height of children who grew up under austerity fell ...”

“... incapacitated from any form of work?’ Tony Blair demanded. The green paper published in January 2006 decried the ‘perverse incentives’ – claimants got more cash the longer they stayed on Incapacity Benefit – that ‘trap people into a lifetime of dependency’. It proposed that Incapacity Benefit should be replaced by a new Employment and ...”

“... When​ Britain left the EU on 31 January, led by a prime minister commanding a fresh eighty-seat majority in the House of Commons, a line (of sorts) was drawn under the most turbulent period in the country’s recent political history. The past four years have witnessed one historic referendum, two general elections, two major upsets at the ballot box, three prime ministers, the birth of the Brexit Party and multiple anti-Brexit groups, a Supreme Court judgment that the prime minister had behaved unlawfully, and much else along the way ...”

“... 5 January 2022. Sent a brochure for Venice, as we regularly are, in which the Orient Express figures prominently, emphasising the luxury side of the journey (and its huge cost). What it isn’t any more is an adventure. Venice by train used to feel like Life, crossing the Channel and boarding the Paris train at Boulogne, getting a seat in the dining car before going round Paris on the ceinture and finding one’s sleeping car ...”

“... On​ 21 January 2017, five million people gathered in more than six hundred locations around the world to demand an end to impunity for harassers and abusers of women. The Women’s March was a response to Donald Trump’s comment about grabbing women ‘by the pussy’, but the protests weren’t confined by their Trumpian origins ...”

“... of Ethiopia’s opening up politically as America descended into Trumpism wasn’t lost on me.In 2019, Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the twenty-year conflict with Eritrea; within a year, he was in the middle of a new clash with the TPLF, a struggle between the former political power and its successor. After gaining office, Abiy dissolved ...”

“... the integrity of the coming vote, no doubt hoping to spark protests à la Bolsonaro or 6 January if the count was close. But on the day, they pronounced themselves fully satisfied – their confidence as good an indication of the outcome as any exit poll. Massa saw the writing on the wall early, conceding before the results were even announced.One ...”

“... log tongs and a Stihl chainsaw (apparently I use the same axe as Lukashenko, a Fiskars X25). Last January, my reserves were replenished by Storm Malik, which brought low my neighbour’s forty-foot Leylandii. I missed the crash but the aftermath was a joy. Aside from the additional daylight, a little negotiation afforded me the trunks and the chance to build ...”

“... the police or the army, who kept a brutal watch over the highways.’ The opening is subtitled ‘January 1981’, somewhere towards the end of Argentina’s Dirty War, so it’s reasonable to assume that the dangers hinted at are crimes of dictatorship, the same crimes that have been censored out of the newspaper Juan picks up that morning in a breakfast ...”

“... implosion to Milošević, whose days in power were numbered.When I met Đukanović in Podgorica in January, he said that he had no option but to turn on the man who had put him in power: ‘Milošević considered us something that rightfully belonged to him.’ Đukanović now operates out of the former Yugoslav Republic Institute for Urban Planning and ...”