“... in the region, and it will for a long time be a domineering competitor on the world market. It may be that only the overseas ‘Chinese’ will remain as an enduring miracle ingredient, though one with fragile aspects. If most of the conditions that made the ‘miracle’ possible have passed, or soon will be passing, this does not necessarily mean that ...”

“... live in a broken society, with a carefully dismantled state. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it in May, unequal and unhealthy societies are ‘a good breeding ground for the pandemic’. Profit-maximising individuals and businesses, it turns out, can’t be trusted to create a just and efficient healthcare system, or to extend social security to those who need ...”

“... resolution passed, and grew in intensity up until the official end of the British Mandate in May 1948, when the armies of the neighbouring Arab states attacked – by which point the Palestinian catastrophe, or Nakba, was already well underway. The Arab Higher Committee, the Palestinian Arabs’ main leadership body, had responded to the UN resolution ...”

“... the odds you would have got in 2008 on a future world in which Donald Trump was president, Theresa May was prime minister, Britain had voted to leave the European Union, and Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party – which to many close observers of Labour politics is actually the least likely thing on that list. The common factor explaining all these ...”

“... policy is a particularly anguished subject. While the peace with Israel reached in 1979 by Sadat may make Egypt a ‘moderate’ state in the eyes of Washington, it has left many Egyptians deeply embittered. Mubarak drew a lesson from Sadat’s fate: it was one thing to make a deal with Israel – quite another to make nice. He would honour the peace ...”

“... rich, and spend the revenue for the common good. But as Hobsbawm tells us, while the noble bandit may be generous and chivalrous, he’s a lousy socialist: Insofar as bandits have a ‘programme’, it is the defence or restoration of the traditional order of things ‘as it should be’ (which in traditional societies means as it is believed to have been in ...”

“... in prayer. Beneath him hands clutch at a blazing heart. ‘Love joined them while they lived. May the earth join them in their burial. Gostlin’s heart belongs still, Legge, to you.’ The college annalist noted that Gostlin had lived with Legge coniunctissime, ‘in most conjoined fashion’. With its unprovocative title, its brass-rubbings and its ...”

“... by that needless bristle at the end, a prickly little warning. Northern Ireland (for which you may of course read the ‘North of Ireland’) has 18 seats at Westminster, and has recently seen two events with significant political ramifications: the robbery of £26.5 million from the Northern Bank in Belfast on 20 December, and on 30 January the murder of ...”

“... each other. Since the City & South London was, uniquely for the era, a one-class railway, this may have led to revolutionary moments of cross-class contact, but hardly to gratitude. When the Central Line opened in 1900, it introduced hanging straps and proper windows, but drew renewed complaints of bad air. A bureaucrat in the Sudan Political Service said ...”

“... of the world’s modern wars’ nor a ‘warfare of terror’, as others have claimed. Lincoln may have sanctioned a ‘policy of “being terrible” on the enemy’, but no such policy was put into force. ‘How destructive,’ Neely asks rhetorically, did ‘the protagonists in the Civil War want to be or dare to be, under the assumptions of that ...”

“... and then succeeded him as president. This most eloquent champion of ‘post-racialism’ may have been the most powerful man in the world, yet he remained a prisoner of his race, of his ‘black body,’ as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it in Between the World and Me.1 In the face of repeated police shootings of young black men or atrocities such as the ...”

“... the land in Sri Lanka. Like many BBS supporters, Nanayakkara stressed that although the Sinhalese may be a majority inside the country, in the greater region they are a minority surrounded by Muslims. ‘We don’t want to become like the Maldives,’ he told me. (People in the Maldives speak a variant of the same thousand-year-old Indo-Aryan language from ...”

“... was certainly far from ideal – he received only a rudimentary formal education – but it may be that the stories he told about it in later years were a way of amusing himself and others. They also give biographers an excuse for connecting the childhood to the work. Sinclair reports that Caroline Blackwood was told ‘by a homosexual friend of ...”

“... her instructor, and felt a tremendous sense of gratitude to dear, old exasperating Henry James. He may not, as Quiller-Couch nastily remarked, have really understood that conversation on the manor house lawn, but he knew his Americans to the core of their romantic ...”

“... might have this as one’s aim. The best political framework in which these values can be defended may well be one of rights and justice. It certainly seems more promising than traditional forms of imposed community. Indeed, Fox-Genovese is uncomfortably aware of the fact that it is the much-belaboured Western tradition of rights which has produced and ...”