“... It is not merely the size of India; it is not merely the population of India – and I may say that one out of every four of the people represented at this conference is an Indian – it is that on purely objective economic criteria, India feels that she is an extremely important part of the world and will probably be an even more important part in ...”

“... treat their elderly, remain healthy, talk, spend their leisure time and settle disputes – may strike you, as they do me, as superior to normal practices in the First World. The lens through which Diamond, an unrelenting environmental biologist, sees the world affords striking insights but there are still massive blind spots. His discussion of ...”

“... will suffer, or flee. Refusing to wade into a fight between a bunch of strangers is sensible, and may be to their benefit in the long term, but it is closer to selfishness than kindness. The weakest element of Jeremy Corbyn’s argument against bombing (by not enacting any precursor, but simply being himself and saying what he thinks, Corbyn is taking the ...”

“... of will to find everything out. On the other hand, it’s also increasingly clear to me that there may be little to find out and that no one, Onc Doc, Onc Nurse, really knows very much, except in an academic way. Everything is presented to me statistically, as probabilities. I can’t find the right question to break through that, to talk about the cancer that ...”

“... has helped the Progress Party to become a major political force. Its share of the vote may have dropped from 22.9 per cent to 16.3 in the 2013 parliamentary elections, but it was able to enter the governing coalition for the first time. When it was established in 1973, the PP was known as the ALP: Anders Lange’s Party for a Strong Reduction in ...”

“... be understood That ‘somehow’ God plaits up the threads, Makes ‘all for the best’, That we may lie quiet in our beds And not be ‘depressed’. Larkin’s work has been rebuked on psychological grounds even by fellow poets who, instinctively, dislike his unrelenting atheism and pessimism. Resistance to his poetry, in poets who do not share his ...”

“... would be asked who or what is the institute. The answer seems to be Dr Saxl and such persons as he may select to help him. We cannot but think that this answer would be found very unsatisfactory. I am not particularly referring to the fact that Dr Saxl is not of British origin, though that does not make matters any easier.’ The next idea was to attach the ...”

“... Morgan’s controlling stake and his public withdrawal of support. Tesla’s AC patents expired in May 1905, dramatically reducing his income; that autumn he suffered a breakdown, physical and mental, and work at Wardenclyffe stopped. The great tower was torn down in 1917 – possibly by his creditors, possibly by the US Marines, who feared that U-boats might ...”

“... but one pays a price for it in the end.’ This well-meant but accidentally brutal biography may be the ...”

“... times. Neither ‘pro-Israeli’ nor ‘pro-Palestinian’, it is impossible to requisition, which may, in part, explain why he was never elevated to the rank of Israel’s ‘new historians’. He writes critically about Zionism and sympathetically about Jews who ran to Palestine for their lives; he writes with great honesty about Palestinians who were forced ...”

“... to get us to that crucial moment, both for Ngugi and for the literary scene in Africa, so we may as well address it now. Whatever his misgivings at Makerere and after, Ngugi continued writing in English. A Grain of Wheat was followed by three plays, a collection of essays, a book of short stories and another play. In 1977 Heinemann published Petals of ...”

“... could approach by manipulating or kneading the reality and the living men who comprised it. Djilas may have recognised bits of himself in Stalin: in particular, the ‘final ideals’ behind the restless realism. ‘Because the true fanatical fervour was so clearly recognisable behind his cynicism,’ a Swiss journalist wrote years later, at the height of ...”

“... all members of the imperial family, he was raised a Christian. Following Constantine’s death in May 337, the six-year-old Julian was overlooked in the dynastic butchery that eliminated his father and other blood rivals of Constantine’s son and successor, Constantius II. Excluded from his cousin’s court, Julian grew up far away on an estate near Caesarea ...”

“... unknown. I have no doubt that, in reality, my young guide was fully acquainted with despair, and may well have known people who had been driven to kill themselves: just a few years before, in the late 1990s, the country had been struck by a famine so dreadful that North Koreans fell dead in the street, and as many as a few million perished. But in the ...”

“... hydrangea); and his need for his unconscious to have its way involves an ambivalence about what it may bring home (the dreams about his dog – restitution, or nightmare?). Ammons was raised in a house that had hardly any books. All he could remember reading were the first 11 pages of Robinson Crusoe – the rest of the book had disappeared. That memory is ...”