“... in South Sudan, a few hundred kilometres at most passable all year long, in a country the size of France*. But it is traversed by a major artery, the White Nile, also called Bahr el-Jebel, the ‘Sea of the Mountain’. All the country’s rivers feed it: the Bahr el-Arab, or ‘Sea of Arabs’, which the blacks call the Kiir and which marks the boundary ...”

“... subsidy. The company trying to raise money for the Metropolitan was on the verge of collapse. David Wire, the lord mayor, allowed himself to be persuaded by Pearson – then the Corporation of the City of London’s solicitor – of the case for public transport in the capital, the one that’s still being made today. Wire accepted that something needed ...”

“... by a mere trickle of other deaths. There were no executions in 1978 or 1980, one in 1981, the year France abandoned capital punishment. If not de jure, then de facto, the United States seemed to have abandoned this, the most ancient and most terrible of punishments. By the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s second term, in 1984, however, something seems to have ...”

“... Guardian. He said it would come from journalists he’d worked with there. He was obsessed with David Leigh and Nick Davies, two of the main reporters. ‘Davies is extremely hostile to me,’ Assange said. ‘The Guardian basically double-crossed the organisation in the worst way.’ (The Guardian denies this.) ‘We left them with a cache of cables – to ...”

“... standard until after the Second World War. Still, the rivulets of blood amounted to a torrent. France imported 33 million leeches in 1837; and of course blood was drained in other ways as well. (A leech grows from 3.75 cm to 15 cm: assuming a constant diameter of 1.5 cm – the leech also gets fatter – that works out at nearly 1.3 million litres of blood ...”

“... necessarily defective consciousness, or giving it a shape like an hourglass, like James or Anatole France. Where, if not to James, could Forster have looked for a serviceable theory of fiction? Certainly not to Lubbock. In fact there was not, at the time, much of that kind of thing to be had. Since then, the situation has altered amazingly: 1969 is given as ...”

“... At Windsor it was the evening of the state banquet and as the president of France took his place beside Her Majesty, the royal family formed up behind and the procession slowly moved off and through into the Waterloo Chamber. ‘Now that I have you to myself,’ said the Queen, smiling to left and right as they glided through the glittering throng, ‘I’ve been longing to ask you about the writer Jean Genet ...”

“... suffering.The BBC launched its Darwin season with Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, and what David Attenborough wanted us to understand was that ‘Darwin has shown us that we are not apart from the natural world – we do not have dominion over it. We are subject to its laws and processes, as are all other animals on earth to which indeed we are ...”

“... traces, like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our ...”

“... the first Marxist theorists of globalisation (or of ‘historical-geographical materialism’, in David Harvey’s more recent phrase). Her unfinished Introduction to Political Economy, based on her lectures at the Social Democratic Party school in Berlin from 1907 to 1914, included a chapter titled ‘The Dissolution of Primitive Communism: From the Ancient ...”

“... Conroy and Miss Ivors in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. When Gabriel tells Miss Ivors that he goes to France and Belgium ‘partly to keep in touch with the languages’, she replies: ‘And haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with – Irish?’ To which Gabriel replies: ‘Well, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language.’ In A ...”

“... was generating abroad made its work that much more difficult. The PA felt snubbed when in 2009 David Miliband came to the theatre without consulting them. A perception arose that the theatre was rich, though its operating annual budget never exceeded $450,000 dollars, modest for an organisation of its size. Juliano had never handed out money, but he had ...”

“... Chester Kallmann can be understood in this context, or the relationship between James Merrill and David Jackson. This, more likely, was the stamp and seal of the love between Wilde and Douglas. In the years which followed their meeting we get two versions of Wilde’s feelings for Douglas. In July 1894, he wrote: ‘It is really absurd. I can’t live without ...”

“... the flat where he lived affected his breathing.Rochdale was also one of the places it’s thought David Cameron had in mind in 2016 when he launched his attack on ‘sink estates’, as if bad architecture, rather than multigenerational deprivation, was the root cause of council estate problems. The Rochdale estates in question were badly in need of ...”

“... and deep distrust of law enforcement never far from the surface. It wasn’t the repartee of David Milch’s cod-Shakespearean TV series Deadwood, but it was impressive. These people were unafraid to state the obvious, or to test established principles against their own instincts. It seemed to me that the traditional regard for civic responsibility was ...”