“... At any rate, these three very different life-stories have little to say about how it may be possible to act upon political and economic structures in order to improve the prospects for a more general ...”

“... also rather astonishing to read that ‘the Hagana had no policy of driving out Arabs’ before 15 May, since the northern commander of the Hagana, General Allon, has described how, before that date, he ‘cleaned’ the Galilee of ‘tens of thousands of sulky Arabs’. The book has been carefully crafted to avoid charges of bias, and its supporters will ...”

“... ear it seems to combine the words ‘agony’ and ‘anon’, with a hint of ‘agnostic’. It may also remind us of the Greek words for ‘lamb’, and for ‘holy’ or ‘wise’. The echoes are fortuitous, but they are not unapt. For, as David Aberbach shows, Agnon was preoccupied throughout his writing career with the private sufferings of passive ...”

“... English has itself shifted in the last generation from the East to the West Coast, and even now may be heading farther west, out over the Pacific, blasted thither by the gale-force trade winds of the Japanese economic miracle. A rising tide of ‘Japlish’ notwithstanding, America for now sits prodigiously athwart the English tongue and the English ...”

“... has circulated widely. One of Hubbard’s biographers, an ex-Scientologist, told Urban that this may be the ‘last generation of Scientologists’. Hubbard anticipated the need to control his religion’s history, making it sensational, rapidly paced and thematically tidy. The only way to handle a journalist is to ‘give him a story that he thinks is a ...”

“... and politicised, the protection of established positions has become a top priority. Consensus may be further off than ever on who was found inside the golden boxes in the structure that Andronikos, with all too prescient ambiguity, proclaimed ‘Philip’s ...”

“... The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, as well as The Passion of New Eve which followed, may seem like excursions. Their successor, The Bloody Chamber, a collection of stories extrapolated from folk and fairy tales which appeared in 1979, not only restored her popularity but brought her to the wider audience her work still enjoys. It was arguably a ...”

“... internal divisions. Calls for revenge for Dogali helped Crispi win parliamentary support in May 1889 for the occupation of the Tigrayan towns of Keren and Asmara, then Adwa, and the proclamation of the colony of Eritrea in January 1890. Enthusiasm for the new colony faded when Crispi fell from power, but quickly revived when a string of Italian ...”

“... Gyurcsány tried to balance the books. In a speech to a party meeting behind closed doors in May 2006, not long after his coalition’s election victory, he admonished his fellow socialists: they had been lying to the country about the state of the economy – ‘no country in Europe has screwed up as much as we have.’ It was time to tell people to ...”

“... types, must have their trappings lovingly catalogued. That’s something historical romance may share with fantasy: its small details are important for the reality effect, whether or not they serve any purpose where story or character are concerned. The artificiality of her Regency novels seems to have been part of their appeal for her; those were the ...”

“... rote forms of stylistic analysis and social history, but a semi-arbitrary set of juxtapositions may not be the best alternative. In a first moment, globalisation made some art historians more alert to the spatial extent of ‘world art history’; now, it seems, in a second moment it has sensitised others to its complicated temporality. But what is lost in ...”

“... present. In its slow unfolding and the inequality of its social effects, March’s triple disaster may bear more resemblance to a premodern famine than to the earthquake-tsunami that destroyed the capital in 1855. No one ever welcomed a famine because of its potential for enabling renewal. The drawn-out disaster gradually exposed and exacerbated class and ...”

“... our own. One can hear the hinge of history creaking, with Bradlaugh rattling at the doorknob. What may seem in retrospect so surprising is how popular he remained throughout his struggles, among a far wider public than his fellow atheists and republicans. When he was ill with Bright’s disease towards the end of his life, several churches offered up prayers ...”

“... had for a time been convinced that all those emancipated should be repatriated to Africa, which may be why he stresses the Ethiopian origins and African colours, yellow, red and green, of the turban of the ancient slave who catches the attention of Sherman’s soldier in ‘Ethiopia Saluting the Colours’. In the end the Galaxy never published ‘Ethiopia ...”

“... from the House of Commons at any time before the refusal of supply against an invading army in May 1640’. In recent decades the ‘new British history’ – first summoned into being by J.G.A. Pocock – has transformed our understanding of the English past. You can’t understand England without appreciating how the interactions of the four nations ...”