“... the US has attempted to control or track guns, its efforts have often gone spectacularly wrong. It may not be much remembered abroad, but many Mexicans recall Operation Fast and Furious. In 2009, ATF agents watched young men buy large numbers of pistols and AK-47-style guns in Arizona. Instead of arresting them, they wanted to see where the guns went when they ...”

“... response to the assassination in Mein Kampf: ‘I was at first seized with worry that the bullets may have been shot from the pistols of German students, who, out of indignation at the heir apparent’s continuous work of Slavisation, wanted to free the German people from this internal enemy.’ When he heard that the assassin was a Serb, ‘a light shudder ...”

“... of all Liverpool’s problems, though her monetarist experiment (which I discussed in the LRB of 8 May) exacerbated them by doing huge damage to Britain’s industry in the early 1980s. Her sub-Powellite rhetoric – ‘People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’ – did nothing for race ...”

“... War,’ he wrote. ‘Now, forty years on, Briggs’s very different Social History of England may in its turn stand as a more robust requiem for a world of welfare state decency destroyed by Thatcher.’ Today, as universities falter and plutocratic inequality towers over Asa’s England, will anyone draw a new Map of ...”

“... they don’t require or want treatment, shouldn’t be given it because it does them no good and may do them harm. This isn’t what this set of patients themselves believe, and though there is little concrete evidence that the diagnosis is of benefit in cases where no intervention is required, there is also little evidence of harm, beyond the fact that the ...”

“... Trade Center, the harbour beyond and then the American continent. During Fleet Week, at the end of May, a US aircraft carrier group would dock at the Midtown piers – the carrier seemed to dwarf the Twin Towers. Looking down at the streets below, you could see lines of sailors in white uniforms looking like trains of ants weaving their way into the city. My ...”

“... of the Scottish Parliament, Labour’s number of seats has dropped in every single election. In May it won just 17 out of 129, tied with Reform in a distant second place after the SNP, which has 58 seats and is about to enter its third decade in government. A chunk of Harris’s old Glasgow constituency is now represented in Edinburgh by Holly Bruce of the ...”

“... the measuring instruments he had devised couldn’t be deployed. Alvarez did as he was told, and may have been the first person to describe the appearance of the ‘mushroom cloud’. But he had desperately wanted to be there for the big moment, and even forty years later could still recall his rage: ‘I was absolutely furious, angry with [Oppenheimer] as I ...”

“... among his characteristics his craving for affection, expressed demonstratively, caressingly. We may hoot, deplore or shrink in revulsion from his promiscuity and baby fathering, but many women, one after another, and often at the same time, responded and, like several of his daughters, remain fiercely loyal. When I wrote a profile of him for the New York ...”

“... into a more critical perspective on the war. Eventually even the cautious Times came around and in May 1972 put Hersh on their payroll. This was the beginning of a pattern that would be repeated over several decades: powerful editors – first Rosenthal, later David Remnick of the New Yorker – supported Hersh, for a time, even while they did not always share ...”

“... a house’s sale price. In the 1930s it was 2 per cent.) When Thatcher entered Downing Street in May 1979, more land was owned by the state than ever before: 20 per cent of Britain’s total area. Today the figure is 10.5 per cent. The disposals include council houses, forests, farms, moors, royal dockyards, military airfields, railway arches, railway ...”

“... means that some of the five thousand data points used for their reconstruction may be inaccurate or contested. Still, their project makes the scale and confusion of the events of the night clearer than a written text, which is by necessity linear, can do. Forensic Architecture are continuing to update the database with new or clarified ...”

“... revered writers are a problem for the younger writer, however famous the younger writer may already be. The older writers are more respected, more famous, and often they now write in a way the younger writer dislikes, but still the younger writer needs or wants their love and respect, and this complicates the relationship. (The protégé also wants ...”

“... Palantir’s technology work? Even those at the company weren’t sure. When Obama announced in May 2011 that US special forces had tracked down and killed Osama bin Laden, employees at Palantir asked their bosses: was this us? What they got back was a nod and a wink and a ‘maybe’. That was enough to get the press speculating that the company’s AI ...”

“... duty to take this course,’ Pankhurst informed Asquith, ‘and I shall not give way, although it may end in my death.’ On 20 June, the front page of the Woman’s Dreadnought, the weekly newspaper Pankhurst had begun publishing a few months earlier, carried her shawl-clad, Madonna-like photograph under the banner headline ‘IS SHE TO DIE?’ Asquith, no ...”