“... it could inflict intolerable damage, not so much with its dozen or so nuclear warheads, which it may not be able to aim accurately at its enemies, but by conventional methods. Commandos infiltrated by submarine would cause terror and havoc in coastal cities in South Korea. Thousands of artillery pieces secreted in tunnels just over the border would bombard ...”

“... the same things, but on an incomparably bigger scale. ‘The impact of the internet on autistics may one day be compared in magnitude to the spread of sign language among the deaf,’ the journalist Harvey Blume wrote in 1997. It was a bold prediction, but perhaps not bold enough. Digital technologies have indeed given autistic people the chance to ...”

“... Grass admits, finally, that he, too, has suffered crushing grief. In breaking this silence, it may be that he allowed that other secret – ‘What hurts. Even now,’ like the fragment of a shell still encapsulated in his shoulder – to emerge at last into the ...”

“... that the struggle in Egypt, not the wider world, took precedence for the doctor; that Zawahiri may have believed the narrow, Nile-confined geography of populated Egypt made it hard for insurgents to operate; but that he put the goal of Islamic revolution there to one side, in favour of closer co-operation with bin Laden, only when he had no choice. It was ...”

“... he informed the book’s publishers in a late-life flash of his earlier manner, ‘you may say that this is the greatest novel ever written – which indeed it is.’ By then, though, the drink had taken its toll, and he died in 1930. His last decline began with a nasty fall, which took place while he was being ejected from the Trocadero restaurant ...”

“... and had begun as an undergraduate essay, written for his Cambridge supervisor, I.A. Richards.Cats may look at kings. It was certainly possible to learn from Empson (‘Kill Your Speed,’ as the traffic signs say). But it would be fatal to make any attempt to mimic his precocious scholarship, his eccentric brilliance, or his quirky and ...”

“... similar – this is an area where the two writers’ bibliographies decisively diverge – and may not have read anything similar. It’s easier to accept the shedding of any pretension to equality in relationships if such equality was never proposed. Even so, it’s not quite fair to suggest that Jay feels entitled as a man to a woman’s devotion. It’s ...”

“... to the cause of peace.The appelés arrived in Algeria by boat, from the port of Marseille. Algeria may have been ‘France’, but for most conscripts it was their first time overseas. Enchanted by the landscape, the blue-green sky and the dramatic bay of Algiers, they sent home postcards of 19th-century paintings. ‘The topics of Orientalism are ...”

“... concerned with literary rivals, now he’s worried about competitors for political space. Navalny may be bourgeois, but if by Russian manliness the boggle-eyed patriots mean courage, it’s hard not to see courage in a man who returns to the country whose government poisoned him, knowing he’ll be arrested. Navalny is now serving a prison sentence, a fate ...”

“... protection to ensure her Italian schools weren’t closed down. De Stefano suggests this may have been the reason she never won the Nobel Peace Prize, although she was nominated three years in a row (1949, 1950 and 1951).In 1928, she wrote to Mussolini calling him the ‘saviour’ of the human race and saying that her work depended on him. In ...”

“... on no etymological grounds – with a wholly distinct cultural milieu, Rastafarians, which may have given it a further racist tinge. My father and his friends adopted the term, and the rastaquouères my father knew – and who always provoked him to chuckle with delight at their delinquencies – were English-born; unlike himself, however, they were ...”

“... faced discrimination and were forced to pay huge amounts. Everyone frets about the future; the war may have stopped for now, but there is nowhere left to return to.The tragedy of this war is that it has all happened before. Punitive measures inflicted on the local population in the name of achieving peace and security has been Israel’s approach in South ...”

“... and it makes me feel deeply uneasy to watch him knock himself out with booze. Although the scripts may allude to some of the problems of alcohol abuse, there’s still a glamour in seeing that beautiful face downing a glass or a bottle. ‘Why can’t you lose your good looks, Brick?’ the Elizabeth Taylor character asks in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. ‘Most ...”

“... Sport Select Committee said in 2021, but there’s a danger that ‘some of the music they love may not be being made in ten years’ time.’Daniel Ek​ originally conceived of Spotify as ‘the future of the record store’. People already knew what they wanted to hear; Spotify’s job was to help them find it. But in the early 2010s, the authors of ...”

“... listen,’ he wrote to van Doesburg. ‘I sent [Rudolf] Steiner my brochure with a letter, which may not have reached him personally, in any case there was no reply! I have been busy for a long time writing an article against all that, and hope to do some serious fulminating one of these days.’It wasn’t that he needed much: Mondrian lived alone, survived ...”