“... that the Aliyev government expected, and wanted, the Karabakh Armenians to leave. As recently as May, Pashinyan was hinting that Armenia might be willing to acknowledge Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan in return for security guarantees for its ethnically Armenian population. An orderly negotiated settlement wasn’t beyond the realms of ...”

“... appetite for abstraction and the fastidiousness that marked much of his work thereafter:We may consider every cloud a lakeTransmogrified, its character unselfed,At once a whale and a white wedding cakeBellowed into conspicuous ectoplasm.It is a lake’s ghost that goes voyaging.The book received measured but disappointing reviews (‘many of the poems ...”

“... psychologies of rescuer and betrayer,’ Wasserstein notes, ‘are not necessarily far apart. Both may be understood as forms of dominance, each affording a measure of gratification and self-justification.’In 1993, Wasserstein and his brother ‘returned to Krakovets’, as it is spelled today. ‘We returned, that is, to a place we had never been ...”

“... at higher temperatures to produce a stronger, whiter and even translucent effect. The merchants may have spent a year or more at a Chinese port acquiring their cargo: almost sixty thousand separate items made in Hunan province were recovered, more than 90 per cent of them painted and decorated bowls piled up and protected by straw, or layered in stacked ...”

“... And it is over now and nobody’s fault.’ Her suicide a few weeks later horrified him and may have contributed to his own in 1939. In the exhibition, tantalising short pieces of film, including what is thought to be the only footage of Strachey, waving excitedly from a window, evoke something of the vitality of Carrington’s heyday. One shows her on ...”

“... Gaza’ more than a century later. A Persian garrison was installed in Gaza itself, which may be the source of a small sculpted ceramic head with a pinched nose and round eyes, pointed at top and bottom into a soft Persian cavalry cap and a long beard, its hairs individually inscribed and painted black. Beside it in the same case sits the broken base ...”

“... to diversify their economies and improve their image abroad. But the Acropolis Museum in Athens may be the most useful comparison here. Like the Grand Egyptian Museum, it is designed to overlook an important archaeological site and to focus minds on Greece’s struggle to reclaim its antiquities. Ottoman rule in Athens and beyond isn’t mentioned. The ...”

“... 77 (Berryman again!) of the sometimes baffling and obscurely motivated Trilce (1922), where a word may be broken across a line-ending, or cascade down several lines. His earlier poetry has both family and God, at least in the form of blasphemy (his parents apparently hoped he might become a priest), but after about 1920 there is not much of either. The poems ...”

“... give a person pause, but Mike is determined. The skipper is recruited and the drifter – his name may be Liam – signs up to join the crew.They are one man short. That place goes to Nick (George MacKay), as he thinks he’s called, who leaves his beloved wife and young daughter for a couple of days at sea in order to make some much needed cash. As he leaves ...”

“... first condom in the loo,’ she said to her husband, ‘and she’ll soon change her tune.’ It may be that Mrs Donaldson was lucky but the two students sent to her by the university lodgings syndicate were in every respect but one not to be faulted. They were neat, quiet and they cleaned the bath and flushed the toilet and were so altogether discreet Mrs ...”

“... these officials on a strategy which is wholly unfamiliar to them and of which, to begin with, they may understand little. For that reason, above all others, it is essential that the strategies adopted by these institutions are debated more widely and more knowledgeably. Both Jonathan Steele’s book and John Gray’s essay sharpen a critique which has so far ...”

“... We go to the opera to hear people sing, not praise the virtues of silence, real as those virtues may be. Of course, there is a question about our desire for screen violence; but whatever else, that desire is not the same as wanting actual violence. In one sense this is a traditional dilemma of the Western. Gunslingers are always trying to quit and live a ...”

“... with’ the unions – which, they insisted, would mean selling the country down the river. ‘We may have to take greater political risks than we had anticipated,’ warned the report, whose apocalyptic and alarmist language meant that it stayed secret. Mrs Thatcher, Young tells us, was ‘tremendously excited by what she read’. Thereafter, the trade-union ...”

“... usually welcome. What then of Japan? Christianity did take there. By the early 17th century, there may have been 700,000 adherents in a population of about 18 million. But these (most of them Catholics) put their God before the emperor. In 1612, Tokugawa Ieyasu accordingly banned the religion, and was taken seriously. In 1637-38, at Shimabara, 13,000 proud ...”