“... a fine equivalent to £4000 today – a paltry price for the dozen killings she aided, abetted and may well have ordered. One of those was the murder by Jerry Richardson, a Mandela United coach, of the 14-year-old activist Stompie Moeketsi, on the suspicion that he was an informer. ‘I slaughtered him like a goat,’ Richardson testified in court. ‘I put ...”

“... can be violent. It can be so even if it adheres scrupulously to the rule of law. While the ideal may sometimes seem our best hope for guidance through troubled times, it is, as Waldron says, not the only star in our constellation of ...”

“... appeared in 2023 and was longlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize. The novel may remind English readers, in different ways, of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (the relationship with the domineering father, the unchanged names, the treatment of time, the reflections on memory, art and writing) or Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend ...”

“... its wheat and wheat flour’, despite having only 3 per cent of the world’s population. Malthus may well have helped build the infrastructure of this empire, but he would have been horrified by the way it enabled Britain to live beyond its means and to ignore a natural law designed to stimulate not gluttony, but self-reliance and restraint.Neo-Malthusians ...”

“... of very rich people for whom art is a status symbol. Authenticating a work is difficult, and a lot may depend on it. How might a grateful owner or potential purchaser reward such connoisseurship? The classic example is that of Bernard Berenson – in Hughes’s mocking words, ‘the disinterested, Goethean sage of I Tatti’ – who charged his employer 25 per ...”

“... Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor’ – is loftier than he deserves. This may be classified as a political biography, but it reads more like an autopsy report from the wax museum. All that’s left to do is to mop up the ...”

“... the teaching of what they call ‘critical race theory’. Lysistrata and Women of the Assembly may seem to propose a radical critique of the disenfranchisement of women in Athenian democracy. But both plays – performed by and for men – reinforce the stereotypical view of Athenian men that women are primarily interested in sex and drinking, and ...”

“... botanical name was attached. No matter how many revolutions biological classification systems may undergo – and they have undergone several since Linnaeus’s time, from a basis in morphology to phylogeny to cladistics to DNA – the type specimen and the plant name remain bound. The dried plants, each carefully flattened onto a sheet of paper, are ...”

“... height of America’s Red Scare. But don’t be misled by the spin or put off by the fact that you may already have a dozen books on the Cold War on your shelves. Both Radchenko’s and Vladislav Zubok’s new books are ones you want to read. They make comprehensible a Russian perspective on a key question of 20th-century history that we generally see only ...”

“... overarching narrative: Scheherazade is talking herself out of her fate. The heroes and heroines may live according to thrilling, ineluctable destinies, but Scheherazade is resisting death through the tales she tells, and if she succeeds will redeem her sex.In France, The Arabian Nights influenced libertine fiction: the young Diderot imagined speaking jewels ...”

“... in blood’. Ebbutt concluded that ‘in influential and reasonable circles [in Berlin], the view may be heard that war, especially in continental Europe, is a natural, almost inevitable thing, and that next time Germany has every expectation of having the means to win and every intention of winning.’ He predicted that war might begin in ‘five or six ...”

“... from Rotherham who joined Ukip aged eighteen, stood for Reform in local elections in Yorkshire in May 2022. He got 89 votes. In the Wakefield by-election the following month, Reform received less than 2 per cent of the vote. ‘There were only five of us working on that,’ Wood told me. ‘A lot of us were clamouring for Nigel to come back. We knew we could ...”

“... nor to have been known to anybody except the people who owned it. This is even stranger than it may at first seem. In the medieval world, all literary production depended on copying. Texts of many different genres – poems and songs, medical recipes, land conveyancing guides, prayers, charms, sermons – were in continual circulation, passed between ...”

“... but I’m mainly bewildered by how much they care. The biggest constraint on my son’s prospects may be that, as a tennis parent, I don’t have what it takes.When Roger Federer was eight, his parents moved him to a new club, Old Boys Basel, which had the best juniors programme in the city. ‘You could tell he had some talent,’ the head coach, Madeleine ...”

“... XVI chief among them) who had failed to reform themselves. In a Commons debate on 6 May 1791, Burke attempted to speak on the ‘horrible and nefarious consequences flowing from the French Idea of the Rights of Man’ but was shouted down. Fox seconded the motion that called his old mentor out of order. In his own speech, Fox insisted that the ...”