“... cruise was led by an American whose identity is redacted, but the editor, Larry Siems, thinks it may have been the navy reservist Richard Zuley, identified in court documents as the Special Projects Team chief for Slahi’s interrogations at Guantánamo, a retired Chicago cop now working for the aviation police at O’Hare International Airport. Slahi was ...”

“... take back to the other side. And he has suggested that McGuinness was aware of his tactics. In May 1993, for example, when the British government and the IRA were haggling over the ceasefire terms, McGuinness gave Duddy a written message from Sinn Féin to be taken to London. Duddy’s archive contains an account of what happened next: The wording of the ...”

“... the history of British India with the story of the Lows and their immediate kith and kin. Readers may sigh at the author’s promise of an ‘epic saga of love, war, intrigue and treachery’. Mount has written some historical fiction: in Jem (and Sam) he invented a 17th-century forebear, Jeremiah Mount, who rivalled Pepys as a diarist, and he has Wolf-Halled ...”

“... judiciary weighs the cost of a new investigation of the former president, word is out that he may have collected €50 million from Gaddafi to fund his presidential campaign in 2007. Sarkozy was one of the most outspoken advocates of Gaddafi’s overthrow. Gaddafi’s death laid bare the cruelties of a new Palmerstonian age, which the West has tried to ...”

“... especially keen on becoming Vietnamese. Conquest was seldom peaceful, and sometimes led to what we may now describe as ethnic cleansing. The official Vietnamese story of the country’s origins, in itself not so different from what were once the dominant narratives of the settling of the American west and the Russian east, demands fealty to the idea of an ...”

“... social (unless it is the result of some psychotic outbreak or chemically induced tendency). ‘We may ask ourselves to what extent it is a social fact,’ Tarde wrote, ‘since it is a sudden and deliberate exit from society. In my view it is social nonetheless, for whoever exits in this way is driven for the most part … by pressures or ideas originating in ...”

“... from Germany on the last train to France. He was lucky not to be arrested as a German spy. In May 1915, he arrived in Zurich, where he met Taeuber. As the painter Hans Richter put it, ‘She was Arp’s discovery, just as he was hers.’ ‘Composition of Circles and Overlapping Angles’ (1930) Both Taeuber and Arp found a place among the Zurich ...”

“... from this history of casual condescension. Increasingly it appears that India’s cultural legacy may lie in the hands of the educated Hindu middle class, which has been growing rapidly and many of whose members remain committed to the idea of a liberal, secular state. Some are religiously observant, perhaps as a form of family fidelity – that is, as a way ...”

“... Edo, ‘the Capital of the whole Empire, and the seat of the secular Monarch, is so large, that I may venture to say, it is the biggest town known’. Its citizens live in peace and comfort. Kaempfer, who came from a Germany torn by wars of religion and feuds between petty baronies, saw an impartial and absolute sovereign as the surest guarantee of ...”

“... examination and its associated intelligence tests, with their visual and numerical puzzles, may have suggested that quite clever but not very was a truer estimation – though here again it’s consoling to read Todd, who describes IQ tests as an ‘entirely arbitrary means’ of filtering large groups of applicants, one so crude that every government ...”

“... the relationship ended’? That ball and chain, still locked, ‘could indicate that a prisoner may have somehow escaped – but it is also possible that they perished while still wearing it, or that it was simply discarded.’ Even a more humdrum discovery, such as a clothes pin, makes us think of the woman who was wearing it as she crossed the river. We ...”

“... its wards. ‘We really are in hell,’ its director tweeted. According to a World Bank report in May, the suddenness and severity of Lebanon’s economic collapse makes it one of the ten ‘most severe economic crises … globally since the mid-19th century’. Economists struggle even to measure such basic indicators as inflation, unemployment and GDP ...”

“... two thousand years from the Bronze Age to the purges organised by monotheist emperors. Mithras may have been a newcomer in the classical Mediterranean, but he could depend on generations trained in the use of images. It is our lack of that training that makes the tauroctonies so difficult to understand, at least to our satisfaction, which is not ...”

“... action to depose Mossadegh. That the widely respected Loy Henderson had shifted his own view may have been a factor. In November 1951 Henderson had warned against interfering in Iranian affairs: a ‘double-faced role in Iran’, he said, was likely to backfire. By the following July he had changed his mind, cabling Washington that he did ‘not believe ...”

“... rooms decorated with ‘anything you can imagine: for there is not any to be named, but you may find it in Prints.’ Woolley recommended pasting prints onto the walls as well as on ‘white plates and flower-pots’: instances of découpage (from the French découper, to cut up or out) before that term was coined. Another Robert Sayer publication, The ...”