“... the revolutionary tribunals of the Terror). Food shortages in Paris throughout May and June, and rumours of an attack on the National Assembly by mercenaries loyal to the monarchy, increased tensions, which flared into violence on 14 July. Enraged by the king’s dismissal of Jacques Necker, the finance minister instrumental in summoning ...”

“... he was going to be killed. His best friend, a fellow schoolteacher called Oliver, was beheaded in May 2019. Ngu had enemies on both sides: he’d received death threats from the Anglophone separatist movement, and Biya’s soldiers had beaten him so badly that his body could be identified months later in Mexico by the scars.Siglo XXI, an overcrowded migrant ...”

“... allowed to fail. There is a strong sense throughout the novel that Wallace’s self-hatred may drag him under. He speaks of dead leaves rotting in black water. He can’t swim, certainly not in a cold lake ‘at some slim, dark hour’. He climbs onto the roof, alone, at night. We’re used to queer characters, especially black queer characters, not ...”

“... in Africa was a class issue, rather than a race issue. He was on the streets of Paris during May 1968, where he was singled out by the police and beaten, escaping with a broken nose.He returned to Guinea frequently, however, to visit Sékou Touré, leader of the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG). In the 1950s Touré appeared to be the unifying figure ...”

“... final few weeks and his death, ‘this difficult, tedious, painful enterprise’. That May, Noseworthy had called Gunn from Palm Springs – where he was living with his new boyfriend, the porn star Richard Locke – and told him he had Kaposi’s sarcoma. A few days later, he arrived in San Francisco to get treatment. Gunn moved into his study ...”

“... to become a hybrid of sorts. The unthreatening looks of a woman. The impervious core of a man.She may be in love, but she’s also on assignment, and the originality of the book lies in the way these states of being become inseparable. In a sense, she’s like the men she’s writing about, the oil workers who live two lives, one at home, one away, and her ...”

“... about the forensic relevance of bones, speaks to the difficulty of assessing how old a bone may be (as she says, ‘setting up a murder investigation based on Roman remains is not likely to result in a solved case’). The speed with which the flesh of a corpse melts from the bone varies greatly depending on temperature, soil type and scavenger ...”

“... for all the fearmongering about antifa (as if to be anti-fascist was a bad thing), anarchism may be another arena where the right has largely muscled out the left. The battle cry of Steve Bannon and gang in 2016, ‘Deconstruct the administrative state,’ is a nasty détournement of the renewed wish of the New Left in the 1960s to smash the ...”

“... feared that the departing coloniser would leave them at the mercy of sedentary majorities. On 30 May 1958, a number of dignitaries claiming to speak for Tuaregs and ‘Moors’ – people of Berber and Arab descent – living on the bend of the Niger River wrote an open letter to de Gaulle, addressing him as ‘Your Majesty the President’. They declared ...”

“... politics, protocol and power’. In Patch Work, the museum – as employer and physical place – may be a place of paradoxes, but it isn’t a site of contestation. Imprisoned women, she notes near the end of the book, made some of the building’s mosaic floor tiles, adding in parentheses: ‘The museum loves that story.’ Coming ‘from trade’ (her ...”

“... gall down from the mountains. Compared to the villagers’ feudal world, the life of an outcast may have had some appeal: ‘To a woman who had to give birth to an illegitimate child, for example, the world of the emishi was the only possible place of refuge.’ This longing, Tsushima writes, ‘gave rise to many folk tales that are still told ...”

“... they went through 1400 metres of coral before hitting a basalt base.While recent threats to reefs may make them seem fragile, they have existed for most of the past 500 million years. There are gaps in the geological record where ocean chemistry and climate didn’t favour reef growth, but isolated corals have always survived, allowing reefs to return. And ...”

“... Boris Johnson’s absurd mishandling of Brexit and his criminal indifference to Irish matters may have laid the ground for a united Ireland, something I never imagined I’d see in my lifetime. Perhaps it will be a country where difference is no longer a source of conflict, but something to be accepted, even celebrated – the kind of country that ...”

“... for Your Home’ on Netflix.I still light our stove, though not without misgivings. I may upgrade to a more efficient model and will switch on the PM 2.5 sensor to test the difference, though really it’s just an amulet, safeguarding the future while the sparks ...”

“... to flee Japan’s bombing campaigns in 1938. As Jing Tsu points out in Kingdom of Characters, Du may not have been aware of Basic but as the librarian of Sun Yat-sen University he knew the Dewey Decimal Classification. He invented a new indexing system to bring order to the unruly world of Chinese characters by imposing the equivalent of alphabetical order ...”