“... woman is an eternal problem that has no solution … She’s an imperfect project.’ This may be so, but imperfection does not imply a complete lack of progress. In the choice between the traditions of Mozambican society with its well-ordered but unbalanced polygamy, and the colonisers’ Christianity with its hypocritical monogamy which also ...”

“... writers in German-speaking Europe between the wars. The oldest readers in Britain and America may still remember The Song of Bernadette, that syrupy but irresistibly powerful novel about Bernadette Soubirous and her visions of the Madonna at Lourdes. Werfel published it in 1941, after escaping from Nazi Europe, and in translation it became a publishing ...”

“... Surviving Shu-style machines dissolve at a curator’s touch. At least one early missionary model may have been consumed by white ants – a chilling image of silence eating up speech. Mullaney frames his history as the story of human attempt and failure, a bold and many-handed effort. ‘The history of modern Chinese information technology,’ he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cards. ‘There is no issue with the currency,’ he said on TV. Greeks’ commitment to the euro may seem perplexing. Around 70 per cent of the population, according to polls around the time of the referendum, wished to stick with the currency, despite the hardship that came with the bailouts. This was a similar level of support for the euro as in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... yarn has sneaked into the project at nearly the last moment. Thank God for the escape, the reader may feel like saying. But why is escape so difficult for Knausgaard? If his writing is a monument to the ongoingness of his cage of sadness, why so sad? And will the heavy feeling ever shift? One clue or motif of his sadness that gets returned to often – his ...”

“... the British Crown & the prosperity following in the train of civilisation. The proclamation itself may not have included the bit about ‘being placed on an equality’ or the queen’s frank recognition of the events of 1857-58 as being ‘a bloody civil war’ rather than ‘a mere military mutiny’. But it did enter the Indian consciousness. By 1875, many ...”

“... Of​ the many remedies Cole Porter used to kill pain – boys, drink, luxury – the most powerful was song. In October 1937, at the age of 46, out for an early morning canter at the Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, New York, Porter lost his stirrups when his horse spooked at a bush and fell on him, crushing both his legs. He gave his crippled legs nicknames: ‘Josephine’ was the obliging left one; the right, ‘Geraldine’, ‘a hellion, a bitch a psychopath’, was amputated mid-thigh in 1958 ...”

“... season can cover you. The litany can be in the list. A can of cling peaches, properly labelled, may not seem like much of an inheritance. But for her it has been everything, more than gold, shared out among her books along with the loaves and the fishes. We have not, while they lasted, gone ...”

“... but never to the same point in time or space. As Le Guin said in an interview: ‘Homecoming may not be such an easy visit, after all. The world is changing. It is a spiral. That is kind of the point.’The primary moral law of Le Guin’s fiction, that fully realised power creates its own destructive counter-currents, operates to her disadvantage in ...”

“... the courts as a bulwark protecting democracy and fairness. ‘How this story ends,’ he says, ‘may depend, to an uncomfortable degree, on dumb luck.’What should we make of the fact that the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s efforts to enlist it in nullifying Joe Biden’s election? The big case was Texas v. Pennsylvania, in which the Texas attorney ...”

“... faction who disagreed. The tap of CCP support was turned off and the riots, which began in May 1967, abated by the end of the year.The riots gave people a sense that Hong Kong, a place that could seem pragmatic and business-minded to a fault, was on the edge of an abyss. The potential for violent ungovernable disorder was right below the surface of the ...”

“... Saint-Simonian beliefs about gender complementarity (although rather mystical) and celibacy may have shaped her adult distrust of heterosexual norms. Bonheur was also introduced by her father to the writings of Félicité de Lamennais, nicknamed ‘Robespierre in a surplice’, a radical Catholic democrat who was formally condemned by the ...”

“... reject the easy joke; I was a tasteful person now, having passed through the refiner’s fire. 8 May. We had flown into LA from Savannah the night before; the city, from our hotel room, looked like a heat map of itself. The jacarandas were blooming. Everyone describes the jacarandas, but my husband, Jason, was seeing them for the first time, in that ...”