“... and ‘mix in’, but ‘their only goal in life is to cause harm to the United States.’ Mitt may be a dull man, but he’s not crazy. He’s tried to pander to his constituency – for example, assuring a worried voter that under his watch the United States will never relinquish its sovereignty to the United Nations or claiming that we don’t need any ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... not be more different from Gosse’s. Personally and intellectually she disliked confrontation. It may be that she had suffered so much from one theoretical view of life that she could never countenance another. Darwinism and its implications, the rock on which Gosse’s father, the author of Evenings at the Microscope, wrecked his scientific career, was a ...”

“... do not want to be known as the modern-day Virgil who leads Dante through Hell (however much I may love Shalamov) … So I have omitted, as they say, the most heartrending details of camp life. I did not lure my readers on with promises of thrills and strange sights. I would have preferred to lead them up to a mirror. It’s a mirror in more than one ...”

“... Hollar. As Kate Bennett writes in the introduction to her superb new edition of Brief Lives, ‘we may be able to hear, through him, the 17th century talking to and about itself.’ What do we hear? We hear that William Petty teaches anatomy at Brasenose and keeps a partially pickled body as a teaching prop, ferried to Oxford from Reading. That Thomas Hobbes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with amendments in the 1660s and 1690s, they ‘belonged’ to Pangbourne, where they began (they may even have had a settlement certificate to prove it, though few such certificates survive). The ratepayers of Pangbourne were legally required to ensure that the Soundys did not starve to death. The ratepayers of Battersea would provide so long as Pangbourne ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by a free press and the threat of elections, they do not allow their people to starve (though they may allow them to go hungry). The scandal of mass starvation is something they can’t afford. But the rural poor of Malawi have a rather different theory of famine. Evidently they think they are paying an additional price for the near (and in some cases ...”

“... calumniated. Such was the state of Christian feeling at the beginning of the present century; we may at least hope that nothing of the kind now prevails.’ The hope was vain. When Darwin’s biography was printed it lacked all but the most rudimentary expressions of Enlightened doctrine. Now Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men, a collective biography of Erasmus ...”

“... windows, it seemed the very emblem of despair, a tunnel to nowhere. Before my first admission, in May 1988, I had never been inside a mental hospital. So my distress, waking that first morning to find myself incarcerated in this preposterously sinister setting, was considerable. Friends who came to visit me – having first walked the length of the corridor ...”

“... club which, if the ‘Left Behind’ series continues to sell at its present rate, he may one day be eligible to join) and was its first president. It is a secretive organisation, made up of some five hundred invited members, including former Senators (Jesse Helms), Congressmen (Tom DeLay), figureheads of the radical Right (among them, Larry ...”