“... sharp economic competitors, hence their unpopularity. The same is true of the victims of the Evil May Day riots of 1517. Again, many of them were Flemish weavers, but the foreign merchants and bankers of Lombard Street were also targeted. All were accused of stealing jobs from English workers. The rioters were mostly displaced young apprentices. Thomas ...”

“... to the world and if what you give to the world is, say, some or a lot of poetry then a) it may not be any good and b) the world doesn’t want it anyway. Is that enough for you to go around putting on airs? Aren’t there other things you could give to the world? I think Arnold felt that powerfully because the world needed a lot of what he could do for ...”

“... life,’ she said in her sentencing, ‘because you are not a protector, you are a killer.’ In May 2013 she sentenced a serial rapist to 252 years – 15 years on each of 11 counts of robbery, 12 years for attempted murder and life sentences for each of three rape charges. Judge Masipa knows about violence. She was born in Soweto, in a family of ten ...”

“... letters. The postman always announced his presence with a ‘burst of prophetic whistling’. In May 1958, eating a slice of toast with butter and strawberry jam before going to teach her class at Smith, she spotted the mailman with ‘a handful of flannel: circulars – soap-coupons, Sears sales, a letter from mother of stale news she’d already relayed ...”

“... London-New York and Paris-New York are possible; Frankfurt-New York is not.Yet, perverse though it may seem to say so, Concorde works at all because, in one limited sense, the designers were modest. They successfully confined themselves to solving only the next problem, filling in the immediately adjacent bits of the unknown. Take Concorde’s chosen cruising ...”

“... profile. In Scotland, 24 areas are examined; in England it’s 17. ‘Two individuals may match in one or more area,’ she said, ‘but the chances of them matching in all areas is about one in ten to the power of 23 or 24, though the statistic used in court is one in a billion.’At the time Nikki was murdered, a large amount of biological ...”

“... to medicals, and from there to military training and despatch to the front. As much as they may admire the courage of their army, the men of Kharkiv fear, and in many cases actively avoid, having to serve in it.After the 11 p.m. curfew on my first night in the city, when I was thinking about going to bed, ignoring, as people tend to do, the air raid ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”