“... of Karameh in Jordan, where he fought against Palestinian guerrillas under Arafat’s command. In May 1972, he was wounded in the shoulder by friendly fire during the rescue of the hijacked Sabena Flight 707. Bibi could have continued with a career in the army like Yoni, but he had more worldly ambitions. Two months after the Sabena rescue he returned to the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... like he comes from another world. That isn’t his fault – he does. But it suggests that he may have overstated the extent to which he could stand in for America. Moreover, he shares the tendency of his high-IQ tribe to let his own side off the hook when he wants to. He acknowledges that however well he understood the principles of workplace ...”

“... bare floors of Pinderfields Hospital in Wakefield. A hospital spokesman claimed that patients ‘may have chosen to lie down as seats were provided’. A whistleblower told the Health Service Journal that ambulance delays in the east of England had led to the deaths of at least 19 patients and serious harm to 21 more. On 1 January, an 81-year-old woman in ...”

“... impression that they are being given the first-hand view of an observer-cum-potential victim, who may not have understood all he saw, but who tried to describe it as he saw and experienced it. The result, as Neil Whitehead points out in his sometimes opaque introduction, is a unique document among European accounts of life among the indigenous peoples of the ...”

“... is one in which the money is earned rather than borrowed, and spent rather than saved. Keynes may have overdone this argument, which was associated with ‘left’ Keynesians in America and his younger followers here, but it has obvious force. The trouble is that such a redistribution is almost unimaginable, given that income inequalities are central to ...”

“... the king’s subjects in 1931? In Delumeau’s late medieval and early modern Europe, the question may be answered with some confidence. In the Christian West of his period there were organic links between what priests and preachers thought and what the faithful practised, though we cannot regard them as congruent. The Roman Catholic clergy had both ...”

“... tells inevitably allows Augustus some of his traditional agency, as well as his pivotal status. We may not want to perpetuate Syme’s world-weariness, but any bottom-up treatment of Roman culture and politics will reach its limits trying to account for a society in which, even at best, the ideals of Athenian democracy tended to get a little lost in ...”

“... theory, stipulates a trade-off between how precisely a quantum object’s position and momentum may be specified. In other words, nothing – not even gluons – can force quarks to sit perfectly still in a fixed location. The more gluons act to keep the new quarks fixed squarely on top of the original one, the more energetically those quarks jump ...”

“... several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible.’ We may think, as Nabokov was pretty certainly thinking, of the scene in Pnin where our hero, about to give a lecture, briefly sees, instead of his actual audience, ‘one of his Baltic aunts’, ‘a dead sweetheart’, his dead parents, ‘both a little blurred but ...”

“... Anna O., Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe and Sylvia Plath are household names. Not everyone may be able instantly to identify Henriette Cornier (who in 1825 chopped off her 19-month-old charge’s head), or Augustine (Charcot’s ‘model patient’, whose much publicised poses taught a generation of mental patients and filmmakers what hysteria should ...”

“... to the capitalist West.) The specific cause of his disenchantment is initially unclear. (It may be that he came to Canada not by choice but because it was the easiest place for a war-blasted refugee to seek asylum – that at any rate is how it seems in the earlier novel.) Our first, dutifully liberal impression is a familiar one: it’s the ...”

“... to do with snowmobiles, the ungainliness of extreme cold weather clothing, Beard’s fear that he may have lost his penis to frostbite after pulling over to relieve himself in temperatures well below zero, and his refusal ever to ask anyone for help. It’s all a lot funnier than a summary makes it sound: McEwan’s jokes are shaggy-dog stories rather than ...”

“... disenchanted. One might be willing to acccept the mundane consequentialism he despised: there may be no transcendental justification for how we should act, but there are variable quantities of wellbeing in society, and we can occupy ourselves in engineering more of it. Or one might rejoice in radical subjectivities: if there are no longer any foundations ...”

“... she can now go back, what was home has vanished. Like the hero of another Russian fairy tale, she may well say: ‘I will go I know not where; I will bring back I know not what.’ In an article on Ugrešić and one of her sister witches, Slavenka Drakulic, Sanja Bahun (also Yugoslav-born) discusses the dilemma of Yugo-stalgia for writers in their ...”