“... thanks to the excellence of Roman road networks and the close quarters in camp, and mortality may have reached 30 per cent in the worst-hit units. For want of troops, Marcus had to call off the entire campaigning season of 168. It was this manpower crisis that sent the Roman recruiters so deep into Scandinavia. There was no evading the disease, everyone ...”

“... existential choice onto the unmotivated decision that opens The Shadow-Line. Conrad’s choice may be interpreted as a response to what might be called the dialectic of success.The shift from sail to steam power made ‘freshwater shipping’ possible, to the great contempt of traditional seamen. This is the kind of work into which, in Heart of ...”

“... the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove (1985), its sequel and its two prequels, McMurtry may have identified most powerfully with Augustus McCrae, the books’ good-humoured and perpetually horny co-protagonist. Then again, in his unwillingness to telegraph his intentions and his solitary single-mindedness, McMurtry also resembles McCrae’s ...”

“... are born. It’s coming through the tunnel that makes something handmade.The codes abound, and you may find you still know them. ‘I thought that sermon was very hard,’ a woman said to me by the nacho cheese station, as we stirred the cheese to prevent it from forming a skin. We had earlier gone looking for a pen for the advice cards; we shared a tacit ...”

“... than I have of the Norwegian context will no doubt discern other, local resonances. But it may be worth bearing in mind that the impact of the Nazi occupation on Norwegian society was especially deep. In trials that lasted from 1945 until 1957, more than 90,000 cases of collaboration were investigated (3.2 per cent of the country’s population was ...”

“... never held any proper political power. He was born in a shabby palazzo in Florence on 3 May 1469. Years later, in the midst of a political crisis, he reflected on his childhood, finding consolation in the memory of early hardship:As for turning my face towards Fortuna, I should like to get this pleasure from these troubles of mine, that I have borne ...”

“... a nearly impregnable barrier to Democratic political success.Reports​ of the party’s demise may be exaggerated. The Democratic presidential candidate has won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections (though thanks to the funhouse American electoral system this has translated into just five presidential terms). Yet according to polls a ...”

“... while Ollo was picking daffodils with Michael and Nina, showed them how to make a bomb. Stalin may have saved Hitler’s life by signing the Soviet-German Pact, at which point the agents were stood down. Whatever excuses Kuczynski subsequently made for Moscow’s fascist alliance, Foote saw that the news hit her ‘like a thunderbolt’. Beurton and Foote ...”

“... There were Italian as well as German ‘executioners’. The annihilation of Europe’s Jews may have been conceived in Germany, but the entire continent was awash with perpetrators. What happened in Ukraine was so appalling, it’s easy to conclude that this part of ‘civilised Europe’ was fundamentally different. Easy, but not necessarily ...”

“... and exacerbating poverty and competition at the margins. And however ugly ‘anti-cooliesm’ may have been, it was also an expression of anti-capitalism. To address the exploitation of the modern world, it’s necessary to confront its racial forms and the patterns of uneven development they seek to naturalise. If the ‘Chinese question’ was, like all ...”

“... that he is better. When he is eventually exiled from the land of the Houyhnhnms for fear that he may start a rebellion, he sails away in a canoe stitched from Yahoo skin. After his return to England, he finds his wife and children disgusting, especially after the shameful realisation that ‘by copulating with one of the Yahoo species, I had become a parent ...”

“... he confessed on 3 December. ‘Why does the spell not work?’ he wrote to a friend. ‘May it not be because I have temporised in the question of brahmacharya?’ Manu’s arrival, on 19 December, gave him hope – and brought a strange turn to the Noakhali experiment, one that still confounds his believers and delights his critics. Forty years ...”

“... Obama remain in desperate competition for his endorsement, until he finally bestows it on Obama in May 2008). If Elizabeth Edwards should be blaming anyone for concealing the truth about her husband’s failings, it’s probably the mainstream media, which when presented with all the evidence they needed by the National Enquirer, decided to turn their noses up ...”

“... are actually experienced through use. Fleet Road II in Gospel Oak Brutalist architects may have created images, sculptures, that they found satisfying, their critics say, but they didn’t have to live in them, did they? They probably all lived in Georgian terraces. As did Alison and Peter Smithson, and James Stirling. The recent petition signed by ...”

“... with King Mob and seeing photographs of the thought-bomb graffiti that proliferated in Paris in May 1968. Some of these utopian battle-cries reappeared on the T-shirts designed by McLaren and Vivienne Westwood and sold in their King’s Road boutique. Slogans and recycled Situationist graphics popped up on Sex Pistols record sleeves and promotional ...”