“... to Eily and Stephen’s first snog: ‘I’ll just clear these plates. Goodbye dried mince. May the kissing go better for the Pinter beneath it. Will it? Orange peel on Valle-Inclán. What might have been a plaster on Howard Brenton.’In A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013), McBride’s first novel, the narrator and her friend bunk off school and read ...”

“... treat malaria, while working as a state employee on a government project.National competitiveness may not be the best way to conceive of what an education is for. For all their differences, China and the US share a utilitarian impulse to treat education as an investment and to measure their citizens’ worth by their contributions to corporate profit or ...”

“... leader ‘to arrest all’ who had known about an assassination plot, ‘as well as all those who may have taken part’. A semi-autobiographical work, Men and the City, evoked the grim world of his rural upbringing in Tikrit, calling it ‘worse than the life of dogs’.Still, he made it to high school and then law school in Baghdad, before being recruited ...”

“... Shia and Christians was let out to Sunnis, ensuring that money kept coming in, and tax revenue may well have exceeded revenue generated from black market oil sales. IS was not weighed down by religious strictures about markets. On the contrary, the ‘Principles in Administration’ declare the need for ‘a comprehensive administration of collective ...”

“... receive an annual salary of £20,000. He later became Lord Howe. Peter Walker’s resignation in May 1990 was followed by an explosion of career activity. He took directorships with the Welsh off-shoot of N.M. Rothschild, the bank used by the government for the sell-off of British Gas, and with British Gas itself, at a salary reported to be in the region of ...”

“... into changing the Selective Service guidelines and so produce a more equitable system. Now – you may breathe again – five years later, Roger’s only comment is: ‘I’d forgiven him for the Selective Service madness. Forgiven him, and moved to his elected city.’ That’s it. No explanation, no fall-out, not even a dental retainer: just Social Change ...”

“... mountains of glossy Australiana now on offer – the bookshops burst, the coffee-tables groan – may be less than obvious. The anthropologist Annette Hamilton, reviewing Australians to 1788, judges that excellent volume disappointing, not so much in what it says and shows of precontact Aboriginality, but in the limitation of its address to readers who are ...”

“... remembered the end, and a cool ferocity that never either overlooked or scrupled the means.’In May 1793 he told the Convention: ‘To fulfil your mission, you must do exactly the contrary of what existed before you.’ Alan Forrest’s essay on his part in war organisation shows him confronting the generals with unblinking radicalism. He had opposed a ...”

“... promiscuous gays and Haitians. Six months later, there were two more cases in haemophiliacs. In May 1983, a heterosexual woman got Aids from a transfusion of whole blood whose donor turned out to be a gay man (although not one who was ‘homosexually active with numerous contacts’) who later developed Aids. As I said earlier, Starr suggests that, as Aids ...”

“... his leadership because he was shoved into it by the trade-union leaders,’ Crossman commented in May 1960, at a time when the Gaitskellites were denouncing their irresponsibility. Gaitskell found his social democratic prognosis brushed aside by the unions at this stage. We know from his biography that he confided that they now lacked ‘a really formidable ...”

“... systems than that revolving round Hermann Kafka, is more often played by the mother. Kafka may have been frightened that he was more like his father than he cared to admit. In a letter to Felice Bauer he indulges in the fantasy of being a large piece of wood, pressed against the body of a cook ‘who is holding the knife along the side of this stiff ...”

“... not of God but of anti-God.’ Such clear demonstrations of the inefficacy of state atheism may well prove that without God people act badly. Clearly, he is right about this totalitarian Godlessness. But his desire to absolve Nazism of any Christian involvement is inaccurate, and undermines his testcase. Did ecclesiastical anti-semitism have absolutely ...”

“... in need of her network. Women with newborn babies, she said, and severely traumatised women, who may have suffered sexual violence. Then there were women from rural villages who had never left Ukraine before and were scared to be driven by men, even those screened and vetted by the police.In Hrubieszów, a small town further north along the border, I met ...”

“... touchy subject. Every year around the anniversary, ‘that day’ is blocked, as is ‘35 May’ (a clever-clogs way of referring to 4 June); so is the word ‘mourn’. Baidu Baike, the Chinese version of Wikipedia, says it is ‘an open and free online encyclopedia’; it has entries for the years 1988 and 1990 but not for 1989, the year of the ...”

“... the Dniepr, containing a smaller EU which in turn contains an even smaller Eurozone – which may get smaller still. Two forms of social order died in our big Europe during the years after about 1980: the Communist system embedded in the fifty-year continental order of the Cold War, but also the regulated, social democratic welfare order developed in the ...”