“... motorist risked having an advertisement inserted in his home-town newspaper informing ‘whom it may concern’ that Mr X. Y. had been requested to leave his hotel in such-and-such a town for entertaining in his room a lady not his wife (for more about this collusive racket made possible under the Mann Act, which was intended to discourage ‘white ...”

“... here backs up Bricmont’s polemic: ‘Prigogine with his brilliant style writes sentences that may sound appealing to philosophers and laymen, and unfortunately to some scientists as well, but puzzle well-informed scientists.’ The analogy with Boltzmann’s view of Ostwald is clear. When Bricmont launched himself onto the more public stage, allying ...”

“... Europe needs that form of interconnectedness which rests on genuine connections. Hobbes may have been wrong about a lot of things, including the incompatibility of sovereignty and federal government, but he was right when he said that the union of a multitude requires nothing more than that they should be represented as though one. What Swedes and ...”

“... the unique and the general; the way it recognises that while being illuminated with immensity may feel like a miracle to a soldier who has lived through a night – or night after night – in the trenches, it is to most people at most times just the start of another day. The features that render ‘Mattina’ so amenable to mass reproduction make it a ...”

“... this sort of thing kept happening to Khrushchev. Take the grand picnic for the Writers’ Union in May 1957, one of his many catastrophic meetings with the Moscow intellectuals, at which, after a weird, vodka-fuelled tirade, he rushed at the poet Margarita Aliger and bellowed that she was an ‘ideological saboteur’. She reeled outside and fainted, just as a ...”

“... On 7 May 1841, the whaling ship Acushnet, newly built at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, fell in with the whaler William Wirt, of Nantucket, near the Pacific island of Juan Fernández (Alexander Selkirk’s lonely home during the years 1704-9), off the coast of Chile. One of the Acushnet’s fo’c’sle crew was the young Herman Melville ...”

“... and recovery from the bloodiest confrontation of the 19th century, in which the death toll may have been as high as forty million, forced the process of decentralisation to continue. The governors who had been specially empowered by the imperial court to fight the rebels were political ancestors of the infamous ‘warlords’ of the early 20th ...”

“... so I didn’t go online. I feared that everyone would have access to my unpublished fiction. This may seem odd since I already believed that every person I met could read my mind. One of the other side effects of Clozapine is constipation. My GP prescribed two laxatives. This just exacerbated the encopresis. My co-ordination started to go. I no longer felt ...”

“... a panel of Commonwealth judges and lawyers noted in 2000, ‘We suggest that the Malaysian malaise may be due in no small measure to the gradual acceptance of a state of emergency as the norm of government.’ A state of emergency means a battery of statutes muzzling the media and restricting the right of assembly and free debate, in a society which is still ...”

“... American literature, while his effect on popular culture has been incalculable. It may be comforting to some arbiters of aesthetic fashion to write Burroughs off as a perennial enthusiasm of ‘the young’, but they might consider that several generations of these young have since occupied key positions in film, TV, the recording business and ...”

“... in its ecstasy, which all children have when confronted with something new, whatever it may be, face or landscape, light, gilding, colours, watered silk. Or breakfast cereal. Or a new pair of tracksuit bottoms. Or a rubbish dump. Or Norwegian housing estates. Baudelaire’s examples of ‘whatever’ are rather too fine for Knausgaard. Baudelaire ...”

“... surpassed Britain’s by the early 20th century, the City remained the financial centre: ‘It may be that hides and rabbit skins are being sold from Australia to New York,’ one merchant banker wrote in 1914, ‘or coffee from Brazil to Hamburg, or eggs and butter from Siberia to London, or herrings from Aberdeen to Russia, or machinery from England to ...”

“... questions about the seemingly arbitrary character of violence in Iraqi society. One suspects it may be related to the way that tribal systems, based on segmentary formations under patriarchal control, react when those controls are loosened and the state is weak. Batatu cites a hawsah or satirical chant that expresses the attitude of the tribes towards ...”

“... readers will feel cheated. In Petterson’s Norway, when snow has ‘a porous, red sheen’, this may be simply the reflection of a car’s rear lights, no more than a fact of winter ...”

“... since the Syrian government and its opponents were both too weak to do anything about it. Ankara may not be the master chess player collaborating with Isis to break Kurdish power, as conspiracy theorists believe, but it saw the advantage to itself of allowing Isis to weaken the Syrian Kurds. It was never a very far-sighted policy: if Isis succeeded in taking ...”