“... from defending itself. Three and a bit years after the new constitution came into effect on 3 May 1947, North Korean forces invaded the South, all available US occupation troops were rushed to hold a collapsing front, and in defenceless Japan the supreme supremo General MacArthur, whose men had drafted Article 9, ordered the quick build-up of an army in ...”

“... support to a Libyan coastguard force that would intercept migrants before they reached Europe. In May, Rome delivered the first consignment of speedboats. In mid-2017 the number of migrants began to drop significantly. In 2018, fewer than 120,000 crossed the Mediterranean, the majority from Morocco to Spain; less than 20 per cent crossed from Libya to ...”

“... Przewalskis in the Chernobyl exclusion zone All these are feral horses rather than wild ones. It may be that no wild horses remain. Przewalski’s horse, named after a Russian explorer, was thought to be the last truly wild breed, though now it seems likely that they are descended from the domesticated Botai. Stocky and short-legged, they resemble the ...”

“... regime’s eternal strength, was at the Grand People’s Study House on Kim Il-sung Square. You may have seen this on TV – it’s the building from which Kim Jong-un watches rallies and parades of missiles and tanks. Despite the military associations, the building is actually a library, where – at least in theory – any Korean can come and attend ...”

“... of tolerance and that if, as is often the case in royal circles, there are no limits, minor tics may become monstrous. The wife of one of her staff described the Duchess of Devonshire to Pope-Hennessy as being ‘Queen Mary’s type, very regal, wouldn’t speak to you unless she wanted something and never thanked you either’, which suggests she considered ...”

“... to sanction them. The extraction of equity often means profits now, costs later – and the costs may be borne by someone else, since they accrue to the firm, not to those who appropriate the profits. In developed capitalist countries, this formula has been generating outsize fortunes at the price of outsize misery for the past forty years at ...”

“... On​ 22 May 1856, Preston Brooks, a member of the US House of Representatives from South Carolina, strode into the Senate chamber shortly after the daily session had ended. Two days earlier, Charles Sumner, the Senate’s most outspoken critic of slavery, had delivered a five-hour speech, ‘The Crime against Kansas ...”

“... in Haaretz, documentation declassified by the IDF shows that ‘in the months of April and May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages.’ The Haganah, which became the IDF, was responsible for at least 24 deliberate massacres of unarmed ...”

“... removed from his position as foreign minister, though not from the Politburo; his wife’s arrest may well have been part of a move by Stalin to oust him from the leadership altogether. Zhemchuzhina was sentenced to five years’ exile in Kazakhstan.Schlögel​ calls Chanel and Zhemchuzhina ‘iron women’, a term first used by the Russian émigrée Nina ...”

“... aren’t conspicuously poorer than other countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Their biggest burden may simply be the sense that France asserts its primacy over them by means of the currency. In recent years, with the rise of anti-French sentiment across Francophone Africa, the continuing hold of the CFA franc has begun to mobilise young people. The CFA zone is ...”

“... eluding his father’s attempts to keep him in ignorance of age, sickness and death. These may look like digressions but all have some bearing on the main narrative. Krishan compares Siddhartha’s shock on encountering mortality to Rani’s after losing her sons. It also resembles his own while observing the decline of his grandmother. For a young ...”

“... be used in places MSG could never go. If you try enhancing the flavour of a biscuit with MSG it may end up tasting of Marmite. But use kokumi to make the biscuit biscuitier and nobody need know that anything was added at all. Perhaps kokumi will put an end to the misery of people who buy low-fat, low-salt food while secretly wishing they were eating the ...”

“... or lack thereof displayed by senior officers. Given the right circumstances, a particular general may wield clout approaching MacArthur’s before he self-destructed. This was the case with Colin Powell in the wake of Operation Desert Storm, and with David Petraeus when the Iraq Surge of 2007-08 seemed, briefly, to represent a historic triumph. At other ...”

“... its shelves of etiquette manuals and well-thumbed copies of Burke’s Landed Gentry, Poole’s may seem an anachronism, but their suits are still much in demand; there’s something very aspirational about commissioning a Savile Row suit. I was taken to see the pattern room, in one of the vaults under the road intended for coal, which was hung with ...”

“... politics. No Labour politician of his time better justified the proposition, which Denis Healey may have been the first to make, that ‘Labour owed more to Methodism than to Marx.’ From his religion, Bevin probably also derived his frugality and diligence. Though he drank and smoked himself to death, and enjoyed the music hall and Chelsea Football ...”