“... will stifle trade unions and representative institutions. A year or two from now Boris Yeltsin may be able to stand atop the converted mausoleum and view the parade of new times: Soviet lumbermen under the command of Georgia Pacific and the Japanese: oil drillers bearing the standard of Conoco; long battalions of unemployed under the discipline of the ...”

“... of the people cou’d be characteriz’d, and I protest for the motto of the meanest place, you may put “Elegant Decorum”.’ And all this gadding only five weeks after Margaret, with her new baby, had ‘added a citoyen to the French Republick’. Much as she enjoyed the months in Paris, Katherine was all agog for the next stage, to Italy. For all its ...”

“... unless they are specialists. And if this book fails to be of much interest to a general reader, it may nonetheless have an interest for a specialist – as the narrative of someone still speaking from within their illness, an extended form of medical notes, perhaps, from a patient who admits that, though she has come a long way, she is ‘not ready nor ...”

“... of popular culture, a fascination with bizarre, paranoid visions, a feel for family detail. He may be the most natural writer in this group, the most effortless stylist, but he doesn’t quite match the others in the power of his imagination, or hasn’t done so yet. His most successful work to date is a short story that departs from his usual ...”

“... like, unless we assume she bears some resemblance to the author pictured on the dust-jacket. It may come as a jolt to the reader to hear Faith addressed, in ‘The Long Distance Runner’, as ‘fat mama’ by an impudent adolescent boy.) The first story in the volume, ‘Goodbye and Good Luck’, begins, ‘I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt ...”

“... for either – at least not for long. Now he could change his stance from month to month. In May he could be aesthetic: September might find him veering just a shade towards the puritan. Some readers followed his fluctuating moods with fond solicitude. Others found them to be symptoms of an irritating spinelessness. Connolly was sympathetic to both ...”

“... retreat from Asia, and how easily a charge of medism could be made to stick to a Theban, they may have had few real grounds. It was more likely his collusion with Athens that had stuck in the Spartan craw.It’s surprising that Cartledge does not take much interest in Ismenias (or Hismenias, a variant spelling), given how central he was to the sea change ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to be five Fijian generals sitting in a New York office watching CNN all afternoon. However that may be, if he’s not prepared to stick his neck out and press for a UN standing army, Boutros Ghali should at least attempt to sort out his military command. If he doesn’t do it, there will only be more unnecessary conflicts. The UN launched its recent attack ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... time, as well as his addiction to tranquillisers. Why​ did he run away? Unsympathetic critics may find it easy to explain. Proud and egotistical, Stonehouse simply wanted to flee from failure and start a new life. He said as much to the Australian police: ‘In order to escape from exceptional political and business pressures which I suffered in ...”

“... of the Gadsden flag, which became the symbol for the storming of the US Capitol. These protesters may be Canadian but the world they inhabit has a lot of American furniture – one person detained by the police thought the First Amendment would protect him. More worrying was the discovery of a stash of weapons – long guns, handguns, body armour, ammunition ...”

“... 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 ...”