“... do not know the city very well,’ he later admitted. He also admitted that as a result ‘there may have been a good many who had not heard the proclamation.’ But then Dyer also said that ‘it was no longer a question merely of dispersing the crowd; but one of producing a sufficient moral effect, from a military point of view, not only on those who were ...”

“... to it. ‘Images hold the world before us, unwavering, unchanging, fixed before our eyes. But we may look again, and again, seeing and understanding more.’Not long after she signed this contract, Hilda left Hogsthorpe for Australia. In the outback, she met a man called Lance Lakey who became her husband. They had two daughters, Judy and Susan, and Hilda ...”

“... motive: money troubles and possibly a grudge against academia (Sabar posits that his original mark may not have been King but Osing, whom Fritz was still bitterly denouncing thirty years later). And perhaps that really is all there was to it. Certainly one wants at times to shake off this clammy individual, to say: pah, sociopath, case closed, not ...”

“... Heaven,’ Banks wrote in his journal, ‘I have a sufficiency, and I do not know why I may not keep him as a curiosity as well as my neighbours do lions and tygers at a larger expence than he will ever probably put me to.’ In the event, his Tahitian curiosities didn’t make it back to Britain; they both died of malaria in the East Indies. In ...”

“... Otte stresses Britain’s alarm at this Russian activity. He speculates that the Foreign Office may have been inching towards a new pattern of European relationships, thinking that the Russian entente had had its day. If so, this was spectacularly bad timing. Certainly Germany hoped that it could exploit the Foreign Office’s anxieties about Russia, and ...”

“... panels is crucial. Each is 35 inches high and a little short of 16 inches wide; originally they may have been a few inches taller top and bottom. The tallness and narrowness seem meant to amplify the idea of elevation in panels one and two – Terrestrial Paradise is followed by a scene in which the elect are lofted, almost sucked, into a kind of celestial ...”

“... heresy’: the notion that supreme law should stand above parliaments, that judges in a democracy may reverse the will of an elected government if it violates a constitution. This storm has been brewing for a long time. Take a late 20th-century example: during one of those recurring leak panics, somebody in Whitehall revealed to a journalist that a cabinet ...”

“... from a political point of view, the Berlin Wall served to calm the situation in Berlin.’ That may sound cold-hearted. But it’s an accurate judgment, though Hoyer also quotes the agony of Berliners, who were the real victims of this wretched event. The Wall was soon overgrown by wreaths of hypocritical propaganda. (I remember a British trade union ...”

“... teacher at Cranborne Chase, who was bent over her needle. ‘My shroud,’ she replied.) This may have been the reason they were so unpleasant to the children in their care. Or perhaps this was how they found fulfilment. ‘If I was your mother, I’d live abroad,’ the matron at Beaufront said to a girl called Amanda. ‘Jennifer is more a liability ...”

“... comes to the impacts on planetary life. Our increasingly sophisticated climate science modelling may give us a clearer picture of some aspects of future warming, but we can’t predict how the world’s human and non-human systems will react. We don’t have any useful analogues, and we can’t run experiments on a practice planet to study their ...”

“... and elected representatives. Whatever Biden’s approval ratings, his warnings in this speech may have helped to set the stage for the Democrats’ strong showing; so, too, did his success in restoring a modicum of civility to American political life.Why were​ supporters of the Democrats – including seasoned election-watchers – so easily persuaded ...”

“... has considerably strengthened Nato. As Biden told graduates of the US Naval Academy in Maryland in May 2022, the Russian invasion had ‘Natoised’ Europe. Over the last two years Nato’s ‘enhanced forward presence’ – established in 2017 in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland – has expanded to south-eastern Europe, with new battlegroups in ...”

“... been unaware of it as she passed between the households. The disturbing thought is that Susan may have felt she had to draw to be taken seriously as a patient. She brought to her analyst what she believed the analyst wanted. By 1950 she was arriving at each session with up to ninety drawings. And true to her method, Milner decided that the drawings ...”

“... leader or the brutality of Simon de Montfort’s massacre of the London Jews.At first sight, it may seem unbalanced that Carpenter should cover 42 years of Henry’s reign in his first volume and only the last 14 years in his second. He explains this reasonably enough, on the grounds that the years after 1258 ‘are the more packed with incident, indeed ...”

“... give up.Byrne convinced me that Pym loved and suffered. ‘Pouring out her heart’ in her novels may have been cathartic for her, even therapeutic. But writing was also a discipline where she put herself at arm’s length. As Byrne points out, she preserved her diaries with one eye on publication and knew when she was self-dramatising. Byrne calls her ...”