“... government, which has also prioritised its own survival over citizens’ democratic rights. But we may also find in this earlier period the seeds of another post-Soviet phenomenon: a longing for a mythic era in which stability and order prevailed. It was fuelled by the collapse of the Soviet social system in the 1990s, and has been strategically nurtured by ...”

“... rescinded blacks’ right to vote almost entirely. Nathans notes these events, but not how they may have affected life on the Cameron land, or what strategies black purchasers deployed to hold onto their farms. It remains unclear how much the closing off of political participation influenced the decision to move to the North. Nathans notes that an oral ...”

“... fewer skulls than skeletons. The Anglo-Saxons had a word, heafod-stocc (‘head-stake’), that may explain the discrepancy: it is likely that three heads were put up on stakes along the ridge-line. Study of isotopes in the teeth indicated that most of the dead were Scandinavians, and that they were all male and mostly young. They had the well-developed ...”

“... American military tradition that prefers light and agile to massive and lumbering, but it may not be insignificant that his home state, Arizona, is one of the few where Lockheed has recently shed jobs rather than piled them on. (What Arizona has instead of multiple Lockheed facilities is the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group at ...”

“... Elisabeth goes next door to interview him about his memories because he’s so old. What readers may not recall is that Daniel tells her almost nothing about his past. Their relationship, almost a father-daughter bond, comes from talking about art, and playing a game describing what you can remember from pictures, not real life. (Elisabeth later becomes an ...”

“... on ‘Value Systems, Social Structure and Race Relations in the British Isles’ in 1954.In May 1948, the Trinidadian-American sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox published Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics, a critique of the use of ‘caste’ by white academics, particularly Lloyd Warner and Gunnar Myrdal, whose study of race relations, An ...”

“... to paint, her paintings becoming ever more distilled and intense. She wrote in a letter: ‘I may never have anything to express, except this desire for a more interior life.’ In her work she showed no dependence on Rodin’s romantically charged, monumental style. Her paintings were usually very small, her focus narrow. She always knew what she ...”

“... reasons: he and Alex shared an ex-girlfriend, a porn actress named Vodka Satana, whose suicide may have been something more sinister. Dopalet forces women (employees, his wife) to do things for him and to him as a way of reasserting his virility and waning influence in the film industry. (This would perhaps feel trite if Despentes hadn’t written the ...”

“... as the most brilliant of his contemporaries at the bar:‘Do you not think that the African may well regard himself as oppressed and exploited by the white man?’        ‘Yes, in certain spheres of life.’        ‘And this is so whether he is a communist or non-communist?’        ‘Yes.’        ‘The black man ...”

“... and willingness to challenge convention. Darwin’s interest in evolution and inheritance may also have been influenced by his family’s health troubles. He married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, and wondered whether his children had suffered the consequences. In Josiah’s own generation, too, health was a constant concern. His wife, Sarah, was ...”

“... that the obscure Judy Geeson film showing on BBC2 might contain some nudity, the 1970s teenager may well have felt lonely and isolated. But as the existence of books like Offbeat and The Magic Box reveals, we were not alone. A whole generation of viewers (mostly but not exclusively men) grew up watching the films of this era on portable televisions or in ...”

“... the same sentiment was behind the ‘deport first, appeal later’ policy introduced by Theresa May when she was home secretary (visa overstayers face ‘enforced returns’; ‘deportation’ is reserved for criminals).I also worked on the case of RN, a Jamaican national whose family had moved to the UK in 2001, when he was three. A deportation order was ...”

“... cannot understand the way I feel/Until I rest on lawns of dawns/Can you follow me?’She may have guarded her responses to the point of arrest, but this music is terrifying in its lack of emotional limits. As Cale said, ‘The Marble Index isn’t a record you listen to. It’s a hole you fall into.’ The End includes her elegy for Jim Morrison, who ...”

“... Gallic crackerbarrel.But it would also be easy to take him at his word. That fairy over his cradle may have brought him a fast eye, but his family gave him the means to exploit it. His father, Henri, owned the eighth biggest fortune in France, and the family lived in a grand and mobile fashion: summer at Deauville and the Channel resorts; winter on the Côte ...”

“... But the bishop was merely reciting the incipit of the Aeneid. ‘Multa ficta.’Brossier may have been a fraud, but what led her down this path? Did she – consciously or otherwise – weigh up the choice between life as an unmarried daughter and the celebrity that might come, however risky, from being possessed? Was her possession ever genuine on a ...”