“... replies: ‘We’ve seen much worse than you. We’re ready for anything.’ The children may not even remember the days at sea without water, when the family escaped three years after the war ended, crowded onto a fishing trawler with sixty strangers.There is artistry in The Refugees, but it doesn’t manifest itself in literary ...”

“... Stalin Worker ME …That ‘ME’ was on no account to be confused with Hughes himself. While this may have mollified McPherson and her supporters, it inevitably led to denunciations from left-wing papers and accusations of cowardice. And it was in the wake of this controversy that the FBI opened a file on him as a potential danger to the ...”

“... frame, or if you know you won’t be able to string together enough pots to make a high score, you may be tempted to play a safety shot by putting as much distance as possible between cue ball and object ball, or even to ‘snooker’ your opponent by obscuring the ball they need to hit behind another one. The surface of the table, usually made of a single ...”

“... Press and Media Foundation, and that the 2022 election was ‘not free, let alone fair’. In May 2023, a delegation of members of the European Parliament concluded that Hungary’s audit system was inadequate and that the government was using public funds to ‘enrich the family and friends of Viktor Orbán’.The resignation of the conservative ...”

“... outside Pollokshields Library. Stephens had decided to canvass in Kenmure Street, which in May 2021 was the scene of a mass protest when the Home Office attempted to deport two Sikh men at the beginning of Eid. A photograph of Stephens in the thick of it and wielding a megaphone was prominent in the Muslim leaflet. He swaggered a bit as we approached ...”

“... which erupted into the Spanish Civil War.’The Cold War’s chief political accomplishment may well have been the end of the international solidarity formed in the fight against fascism. National and even regional lefts persisted, but in isolation proved vulnerable to what Vincent Bevins has called ‘the Jakarta method’, in reference to the purge of ...”

“... the wind dry them on all sides. If all goes well, they can be taken home, maybe even by the end of May, and made into a rounded peat stack with a herringbone pattern that will repel the wind and rain.Although I didn’t grow up doing this, a whiff of peat smoke stirs something in me, something that doesn’t care about falling into cliché because the smoke ...”

“... along as a manager of government debt until it was finally wound up in 1853.The South Sea Company may have proved an embarrassing liability, but other companies generated the transoceanic flows of information on which imperial strategy increasingly depended. To talk up their contributions to the Enlightenment might seem like praising BP or the Sacklers for ...”

“... When​ the conspiracy theorists, diehard Trumpers and (white) natalists gathered in London in May for the UK National Conservatism Conference, one fascinating sideshow was the brawl over the carcass of Margaret Thatcher. A few weeks before the event, Ryan Bourne, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute, had warned those attending the conference against ‘importing the worst American narratives into British politics’ and in the process abandoning Thatcher’s free market legacies ...”

“... experience of standing at the crossroads of the ancient city, where it seems possible that someone may appear at any minute. ‘The very semblance of life in this place,’ she wrote, ‘makes one all the more sad at its eternal silence.’The artistic possibilities of vulcanology expanded with the eruptions of the 1790s. In a period of experiment that would ...”

“... Scottish home rule, a cause inherited from Radical Liberalism, was also abandoned. When, in May 1924, George Buchanan, the ILP MP for Glasgow Gorbals, introduced a Private Members’ Bill on the issue, it was talked out by Conservative backbenchers. Buchanan, backed by his fellow Clydesiders, pleaded with MacDonald to grant additional parliamentary ...”

“... past as if it were the present is vulnerable: the past/ present becomes a double-edged sword. You may be sued if you call anybody here a ‘Nazi’, but one hears it a lot. It would be more appropriate to compare Israeli brutality with the French in Algeria, or the British in Sudan or Malaysia, but we are taken up with the notion of ‘our past turning into ...”

“... They also knew that an attack needed good weather and calm seas. No attempt had been made in late May, when heat records were shattered in the South of England, and German officials were confident that there wouldn’t be an invasion in early June either. The German forecasters told high command that there would be rain and gale-force winds in the English ...”

“... jazz – that allowed one to jump and move quickly across planes of understanding’. This may be a reference both to Walter Benjamin’s ‘tiger’s leap into the past’ and to a well-known C.L.R. James essay, which quotes Lenin’s emphatic repetition of the word ‘LEAP’ when reading Hegel’s Logic. As James paraphrases, ‘the new thing LEAPS ...”

“... embody the barbarism of peoples invading the Roman Empire.Alternatively the historical narrative may be one of decline, with the human lifespan providing a model – youth, maturity, ageing. In the early 19th century the English architectural antiquary Thomas Rickman looked at the changing styles of medieval Gothic windows and came up with the terms ‘Early ...”