“... than the vaguest chimera, but Goldman’s appeal, her ability to mesmerise as well as terrify, may have had something to do with that elusive ...”

“... described Albania as an ‘oriental’ country where ‘a certain amount of financial wisdom may have to be instilled by means of a revolver.’ By this time, the gun had mostly yielded to the pen – preferably wielded by a former colonial administrator. Nixon was impressed by one candidate for a job at the League who had ‘experience governing rather ...”

“... by resentment at the French government’s conduct of the war, which lasted from 18 March until 28 May 1871. In an important recent study of the Commune, Quentin Deluermoz argued for its global character, as a manifestation of revolutionary republican tumult stretching from Martinique to Algiers, and a moment of political rupture that shaped the radical left ...”

“... cartooning is. There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Miró and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.’ He might have added Matisse, Mondrian and Léger, among others. They are all there, read through the comics, in his paintings: the ambiguous signs of light and ...”

“... Mr Brittan was suddenly saved by a generous withdrawal from Sir Raymond, who accepted that there may have been a ‘misunderstanding’. No sooner was Mr Brittan out of that, however, than he was entangled once again. The Prime Minister told the House on 14 January that she had set up an inquiry into the leaking of the Solicitor-General’s letter about ...”

“... of Anglo-British governance remains that all official information is secret but that officialdom may choose to bestow access to parts of it on people who are not otherwise entitled to know it. For the last few centuries this has principally meant the press and the media, and the state has always been aware that such access can be sold in return for political ...”

“... that a new national myth can help to provide a solution to our current divisions. But readers may wonder if the role of the historian today is not so much to devise new myths as to piece together a candid appraisal, no matter how alarming, of the fraught moment in which we ...”

“... one of the pros of moving here – you can buy an apartment at lower than market price, and it may turn into a small fortune.’ We drove through the Rongxi section of the city, which occupies the third county that Xiong’an claimed. More than 37,000 people have moved back here. Considering the stagnation of the property market in the rest of the ...”

“... something almost impertinent … Literature flies so high and is so hotly spiced, that our notes may seem hardly more than breaths of common air or draughts of water to drink.’ This apparent modesty is as rhetorical as the most florid bid for literary distinction. One of Whitman’s recurring motifs is his imagined dissolution of himself into a prospective ...”

“... MPs, less than a quarter of the popular vote and Reform vying to be Labour’s main rivals, they may look as if they are finished for good, which Kemi Badenoch tells us will mean the end of Western civilisation. But history suggests that it would be a mistake to write them ...”

“... was declared.My father wanted his first child to be a boy.Barbara Holly Goldin. Date of birth: 21 May 1946.Sex: female.Family photographs arrange themselves on the three screens, supplemented by Goldin’s more recent pictures. She tells us that Barbara started playing the piano at the age of four and taking lessons aged six. She liked to mother, and later ...”

“... sorts to the day before the meeting with Pascal, when she encountered Lucien’s uncle Robert, who may be planning something sexual for her, then a brief shower, and at last she’s off to her meeting, back in the narrative present. I wish I could say there is a reason for any of this, but I was left with the impression that Kushner had groped her way ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... one could produce beauty without caring about morality, spirituality or God.But however much she may have hated it, Campo was still marked by her time. She was just reaching adulthood when existentialism took hold in Europe. She, too, was searching for meaning in the ruins of European culture. She turned to religion and to fairy tales to restore a sense of ...”

“... charcoal – in China, that meant the charred pods of the soap-bean tree. The recipe for gunpowder may have come from the kitchen, where meat was cured with saltpetre; sulphur was an ingredient in medicines. The optimal blend and its uses, including as an elixir, came from accident and experiment. A ninth-century Chinese text, the Classified Essentials of the ...”