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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are forced to travel to England – as many still do from Northern Ireland where, despite the 2019 decriminalisation, provision of services has been repeatedly blocked by the health minister, Robin Swann. As in the US, there are long-standing efforts to erode the legal protections that exist for abortion in Britain. The Tory MPs Nadine Dorries, Jeremy ...”

“... Amin Maalouf, Le Naufrage des civilisations (‘The Shipwreck of Civilisations’), published in 2019. Maalouf is a Lebanese-Christian novelist who, for the last two decades, has been warning of the threat posed by ‘identitarian’ political movements. Le Naufrage is both an elegy for the Levant in which he grew up, and a reflection on the violent ...”

“... them in some recent work, such as Alec Ryrie’s Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2019). The religious misgivings of the devout were apologetic, shameful and secretive, ingredients of a ‘covert history’ that contrasts starkly with the swaggering self-confidence and certainty of well-known freethinkers such as Christopher Marlowe. These men ...”

“... has made clear that under a Tory government ‘fiscal consolidation’ will be maintained until 2019 at least. Where further savings and cuts – roughly £55 billion over the next parliament, ‘cuts on a colossal scale’ according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies – are to be found hasn’t been made clear, still less where the money will come from ...”

“... company to pursue projects with clear societal benefits and set up an AI ethics unit. He left in 2019 after allegations of bullying. His latest venture, Inflection AI, a $4 billion company backed by Microsoft and Nvidia, aims to produce AI that is empathetic as well as useful. Its main consumer offering is Pi, a chatbot that engages you in conversation ...”

“... and more like a constraint on it. Was a Hamas-run Gaza an asset to Israel, as Netanyahu said in 2019?There were signs that Hamas realised it had been backed into a corner. When Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s junta in Egypt attacked the tunnel smuggling system from Sinai in the winter of 2013-14, Hamas decided to resurrect efforts at reconciliation with Fatah. But ...”