“... schools, transformed the structure of the profession, making the knight’s move a normal means of advancement. Instead of history being a job for life, or, to put it more grandly, a vocation, it became a mere stage in the teacher’s career, leading to more indeterminate, but influential positions such as year leader, course co-ordinator, head of ...”

“... the sense is that the detainees are also being punished for being women. This reality is by no means specific to the UK. In July, the New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the object of sexually explicit social media posts by border guards after she described the horrifying conditions in US border detention centres: detainees had reported ...”

“... must rule on ‘how’ a person came by their death, the word ‘how’ in fact meant ‘by what means and in what circumstances’, and so it was appropriate to go into the details of what had happened and in particular to look at any official dereliction of duty that might be thought to have been causative. No doubt their lordships were much influenced by ...”

“... no scrutiny’. Before ending the supply of food and water to the miners and removing their means of exit, the police had, it seems, failed to make certain that they had a way to get back to the surface.Like thousands of South African mine shafts, these three shafts were closed by the companies that owned them when they stopped being profitable. They ...”

“... are life-enhancing or give pleasure, but that they are a test of the health of a society. Bad art means bad lives are being lived. Good policies will be known by the art they encourage. The works C.R. Ashbee is remembered for – a couple of original if slightly awkward houses in Chelsea, some pretty silver and jewellery of an almost Art Nouveau ...”

“... supporting a distinctive race or community, is restricted’ [emphasis added] – which actually means that it is forbidden, because there are no provisions for exceptions. That still left in place pre-existing foundations, allowing a dwindling number of Armenian and Greek churches as well as synagogues and schools to keep going, but in 1974 new legislation ...”

“... sentenced 13 of them to death. The ‘boss’, a powerful Indonesian Chinese businessman known as David Wong, was arrested in Indonesia and sent to prison for six years. Wong is by no means the only boss. Sony Wei, the leader of the pirates who hijacked the Chang Sheng, spoke, in the course of his testimony, of working for ...”

“... education legislation last year, ‘If challenging the allegedly oppressive liberal cultural elite means insisting on climate change sceptics being appointed to senior academic positions regardless of their attitudes to evidence and reasoned debate, then our universities and their reputation are, indeed, at risk.’ Quite. The university isn’t, and ...”

“... adequate to the mass annihilation seems to fail. Every effort to stabilise recollection by means of language comes too late – too late for those who were its victims, too late for the event itself.’ How does one stabilise such a recollection? Even today, fifty years later, the historians’ question can hardly be separated from the travails of the ...”

“... of the towns. It has created enormous cities. Capitalism has agglomerated population, centralised means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. Capitalism has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. Capitalism has been the first to show what man’s activity can ...”

“... up at the right place. And sometimes it’s got a funny joke name and you don’t know what it means: you’ve got to be at Toggers or something. I hated all that. But I had a very nice housemaster – George Lyttelton of the dreaded Letters – who allowed me to educate myself. He thought it was rather amusing that I was reading Proust, though he didn’t ...”

“... of a solution, by fleshing out the original makers of the myth – Joe and Rose Kennedy. David Nasaw’s The Patriarch is a comprehensive account of Joseph Kennedy’s ascent from lace-curtain respectability to extraordinary wealth and political influence, followed by exile to the margins and vicarious achievement through his sons. Nasaw shows that ...”

“... Indeed, Dr Reynolds gives us rather less, in the way of personal detail, than the recent study by David Coombes. There is far less about Sayers’s marriage, for example; but we do not feel – at any rate, I did not feel – that this is a case of suppressio veri. More an exercise in getting things in perspective. Yes, Sayers was a vicar’s daughter who ...”

“... Vigars, a prominent Cambridge intellectual. The two are bonded by a reverence for democracy. This means ‘to get anything done at all, one has to move in tremendously mysterious ways’. Howard emerges in his second stage as an unscrupulous administrator, well versed in the rudiments of life: morbidity and a hostile environment. Meanwhile hopes of enriching ...”

“... disputes and nearly three hundred maritime boundary disputes of which 49 were (and are) active. David Colson, a legal adviser in the State Department, observes that the Falklands crisis was ‘an example of how not to control or resolve a sovereignty dispute between states’: he goes on to relate how some countries have set aside doctrine and pride in ...”