“... cases rather than strikes. Beatrix Campbell, in Wigan Pier Revisited, a book published on the very eve of the 1984-5 strike, presciently rehearsed some of these themes, arguing that the famed militancy of the miners was premised on the exploitation of women. She has amplified and generalised the argument in subsequent writings. A refusal to mourn the passing ...”

“... Inevitably, such convulsions generated an even more violent reaction, like that called for in Martin Luther’s infamous pamphlet of May 1525 – Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants. The cure was to be cruder than the ailment: ‘Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more ...”

“... person were misleading. Monnet is a figure more out of the world of André Mal-raux than of Roger Martin du Gard. The small, dapper Charentais was an international adventurer on a grand scale, juggling finance and politics in a series of spectacular gambles that started with operations in war procurements and bank mergers, and ended with schemes for ...”

“... burnt-out ruin than Stalingrad had ever been. At the height of the fighting, on New Year’s Eve, Yeltsin handed over his office to Putin. New presidential elections were set for late March. By the end of February, the Russian high command felt able to announce that ‘the counter-terrorism operation is over.’ Putin flew down to celebrate ...”

“... republic he chose for his inquiry signalled that from the outset. Completed in August 1991, on the eve of the failed coup, and published soon afterwards, The Emergence of Political Organisations in Contemporary Estonia set what would become his agenda. At the turn of the 1990s, he wrote, the USSR offered a kind of controlled historical experiment for ...”

“... Paymasters held to ransom. ‘That was exactly the plan,’ Livingstone told his audience at St Martin-in-the-Fields. ‘It has gone absolutely perfectly.’ In boroughs affected by this 2012 game-show rabies – long-established businesses closed down, travellers expelled from edgeland settlements, allotment holders turned out – there were ...”

“... below. Among them were the poet Samuel Ferguson and the painter Frederick Burton.The writer Martin Haverty, who was also among the company, wrote: ‘This was our culminating point of interest – the chief end and object of our pilgrimage … This was the Acropolis of Aran … the venerable ruin which Dr Petrie described as “the most magnificent ...”

“... there’s no choice, there’s only TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’ On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who is Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby ...”

“... West Germany’s 8-3 loss to Hungary in the group stage in 1954 is explicated via the theologian Martin Schloemann’s hypothesis that the saying derives not as commonly assumed from a remark of Luther’s, but rather from a 19th-century woodcut depiction of Luther that became a common symbol of reconstruction after the Second World War. There are footnotes ...”

“... It’s an old tactic and it is still in play around the Grenfell disaster. As soon as Martin Moore-Bick, the chair of the public inquiry, announced that he would be seeking answers rather than taking dictation from those with passionate feelings, he was dismissed as a ‘posh white man’. It was reported that the community felt he had ‘the ...”