“... juice had been known for its medicinal properties since antiquity. Alexander the Great’s army may have introduced Anatolian opium into Iran, a history implicit in the linguistic connections between Greek opion, Persian afyun and Indian afeem. Mercantile networks across Asia carried it to China, where it was known as yāpiàn. By the 16th century, the ...”

“... this argument in his celebrated manifesto ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’, which appeared in the May 1962 issue of New Worlds, and over the next few years in various other essays and reviews, the best of which are brought together in Mark Blacklock’s new edition of the journalism. Ballard’s view was that science fiction should get over its ...”

“... the world’; ‘Africans eat only once a day, in the evening’; ‘Darkness unnerves them, they may flatly refuse to drive after sunset.’ He scorned Kapuściński-land as a ‘left-leaning, Rider Haggard world of strange, voiceless, dark peoples doing strange, voiceless, dark things’.Wainaina’s target is the racist trope. How to Write about Africa was ...”

“... celebrated the Restoration in 1660 with more enthusiasm than Sherborne in Dorset. It was late May, and crowds piled into the tight streets of the ancient castle town. Wine flowed and hogsheads of beer and baskets of white bread were put out for the poor. Some five thousand troops gathered, on horse and foot, as Sir John Strangways, a local ...”

“... Jews are excluded from public office in April; trade unions are banned and books are burned in May. Step by step, Germany is transformed. Carson spares her readers no detail of the disaster as it evolves. But her impulse to account for the Klugers’ commitment to the Nazis does not waver. Helmy isn’t a monster, though his actions have monstrous ...”

“... unhelpful neologisms such as ‘Antipostfascism’. The optimism with which she ends her account may also be misplaced. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland, now the second largest party in the Bundestag after doubling its seats at this year’s election, is attempting to revive the stigmatisation of the disabled, on the basis of the populist fantasy ...”

“... have shown that, at least when assessing the potential toxicity of new drugs in humans, rats may be worse than useless. One analysis found that ‘results from tests on animals (specifically rat, mouse and rabbit models) are highly inconsistent predictors of toxic responses … little better than what would result merely by chance – or tossing a ...”

“... it on the charts’. A wall of weird masculinity supplements behind him and a carnivore dog.You may want to lay off the coffee, we told him gently, when he described how his hands shook when he was trying to install the guitar pickup. On the mornings I have metalsmithing class, I drink green tea, I said. That’s a very good suggestion, Bit, he said ...”

“... gracious and measured, and why he isn’t that in other settings I don’t know.’ Then again, he may have been played. In the New York Times, Larry David responded to Maher’s account of his cheery time visiting the commander-in-chief with an alternative version: ‘My Dinner with Adolf.’ ‘It wasn’t just a one-way street, with the Führer dominating ...”

“... I would not have believed you.’ Since X. is younger, and stronger, than the chambermaid, one may hope that he, rather than she, represents Poland’s ...”

“... All the necessaries of life are impudently dear. Miners of England and Australia, however poor may be your lot, however dark your present prospects, let no man tempt you to South Africa with tales of the wages that are paid upon the Rand! The wages are high indeed, but the price the workers pay for them is paid in suffering and blood. Van Onselen, being a ...”

“... often sleep on three legs. Jonathan Wordsworth goes on to warn his reader, with a logic that may escape those unfamiliar with recent Romantic criticism, not to ‘overstress the ordinariness of what is happening’. We, like the peasant, would probably see a horse asleep in the moonlight, whereas Wordsworth ‘points out ... something quite different. We ...”

“... feelings in their faces.’ Hitchcock’s films are informed by the sense that pleasant faces may conceal murderous feelings. Respectable appearances repeatedly dissolve into extraordinary menace. Benign professors whip out guns, as do nuns and housekeepers. Being afraid that friendly looks might fade to an ominous black stare isn’t, of course, an ...”

“... Birkenhead’s rise seems less attractive, and his decline more pathetic, than ever before. He may have been the architect of his own advance, but he was also smith of his own misfortune. Like Lord Campbell’s earlier Lord Chancellors, there was ‘a sort of romance’ about him. But it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Lord Birkenhead’s ...”

“... to mid-Forties, Orwell’s scolding certitudes – his ‘honesty’, his ‘decency’ – may well have grated on the nerves; and not just because he was so good at sniffing out hypocrisies. A natural sceptic, Orwell rarely seemed to be in doubt, and he had no patience with the routine ifs and buts of political discourse. Quite a few people who knew ...”