“... 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 ...”

“... and Denise Murrell point to the First Pan-African Congress, held in Paris in February 1919, which may have inspired Valadon’s series. Adrienne Childs notes the vogue for jazz (especially in Montmartre) and the prominence of Black performers. Valadon’s Black Venus (her own title) predates the rise of Josephine Baker, and imagines a woman outside this ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have definitive information, it is thought that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed may have been held in a prison built on the island in 1984. We do know that the anti-Gaddafi guerrilla leader and politician Abdelhakim Belhaj and his wife, Fatima Boudchar, were arrested in Malaysia in 2004 and rendered from a black site in Thailand via Diego ...”

“... that we have to choose between good institutions and good characters. A clue to this oversight may lie in the strange picture of justice that feminists and other contemporary advocates of an ethic of virtues paint. Justice, they rightly hold, is a matter of applying universal and abstract rules. They then insist that justice must be not merely universal ...”

“... that republic Qian Mu, gently nudged by Dennerline, reaches back to share his values with us. We may not accept or approve of them all, but it is hard to deny that there was something truly worth saying at the centre of his ...”

“... set a political trend which is being followed by independent Namibia and by Mozambique, and may soon be pursued by Angola and South Africa. The inescapable memories of violence make it hard to believe in the present sense of security. Entebbe Airport evokes the pointless murder of the elderly Israeli hostage, Dora Bloch; Lake Victoria those of the four ...”

“... man’s intellectual inferior’, adding: ‘her prerogative function of child-bearing may possibly involve this.’ Pearson married another woman, had a famous scientific career and in old age regretted ignoring his wife and children. Olive had a breakdown when Pearson did not reciprocate her love. She returned to her native South Africa, where ...”

“... survived the millennium, even if a melancholy Japanese sociologist suspects that modernity itself may be ending. California has split into different states, and a host of new religions have sprung up, including a trailer-camp video-sect who believe the television screen is a kind of ‘perpetually burning bush’. In Los Angeles the wealthy shop in exclusive ...”

“... Hitler came to power, Labour and many Liberals opposed rearmament, but Keynes was all for it. He may, perhaps, have had an ulterior motive, and welcomed rearmament as a camouflaged form of public works. But generally speaking he did not echo the anti-fascist line of the Left; if he was enraged by the activities of Mussolini and Franco, there is little ...”

“... a ‘mercy mission’ to save us from being sold into slavery by his kinsman. This ignorance may have had something to do with the fact that I worked almost entirely at the House of Commons and rarely visited the office. With one exception, we members of the political staff were like stokers in a coal-fired ship, shovelling fuel into the furnaces in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... editor-presenter of the arts’ he rates the accolade of his own Spitting Image. Lynn Barber may have famously delineated his ‘awful smug matey blokiness’ in the pages of the Independent on Sunday, but perhaps that only demonstrates what an inviting target Bragg has become. As a character in Kingdom come (1980) explains, ‘the rules are simple ...”

“... The aloofness, which became chillier as de Valera’s sense of himself as a man of destiny grew, may have been the result of maternal rejection. Born in the United States to an Irish mother in 1882, de Valera was sent, aged two, back to the family home in Limerick, where he was brought up by an uncle. It was a grim life, digging potatoes by day and sleeping ...”

“... policeman humorously rejects Freddie’s account as a fantasist’s pack of lies. We readers may think we know better, but perhaps it is in our own interest to take sides. There is something sadly familiar about Freddie’s attempts – oh, in those studied sentences, that precise diction – to retrieve the past, reinvent himself, put two and two ...”