“... from recent prods to produce work of greater scope. In The History Manifesto (2014), Jo Guldi and David Armitage worry that the production of scholarly miniatures disqualifies historians from contributing to urgent cultural and political discussions – about climate change, sustainable production, international governance etc – in which the longue durée ...”

“... forces that coalesced around the 2016 referendum had been gathering strength since 2010. David Cameron went into that year’s general election with an undeliverable pledge to reduce net immigration to less than a hundred thousand a year, a target he never came remotely close to hitting. With each quarterly announcement of the figures, the ...”

“... like a thaw.’ Like my heart slumped sideways in my chest, or like countless small muscles held rigid for the last four years relaxed. All this was involuntary and to a certain extent foolish. (‘Do you think Margaret Thatcher had girl power?’) But one function of authoritarianism is to lock an entire people in a single man’s mind. I lived in that ...”

“... At least rhetorically, at least momentarily, aesthetic autonomy and political commitment were held together. After the next world war, they would diverge again, with the celebrated debate between Adorno and Sartre only one indication of the gap.The internal politics of Surrealism were also fraught. Although purges are as common in artistic movements as in ...”

“... memorial service from St Paul’s Covent Garden, one of a growing number, I imagine, of those held on Zoom. I am unexpectedly on the verge of tears for someone who always put a smile on my face in art and life. I once told him that I was hoping to write a play, the first line of which was a woman saying, ‘My third husband was most unsatisfactory. Sodomy ...”

“... Meanwhile, Modi’s cronies have flourished. The Economist estimates that the share of wealth held by billionaires in India that derives from cronyism has risen from 29 per cent to 43 per cent in six years. According to a recent Oxfam report, India’s richest 1 per cent owned more than 40.5 per cent of its total wealth in 2021 – such statistics are ...”

“... had gathered. Local residents were appalled; up until this point free parties had usually been held far from towns and cities. ‘I have never seen such filth and degradation,’ one councillor fumed. ‘These people have turned Castlemorton into a cesspit, a human rubbish tip.’ What was it about raves that had to be stopped? Breaking into warehouses ...”

“... any memory of his existence’ and so changed her son’s name from James Donald Bowman to James David Hamel: ‘Hamel’ was the name of her next husband; she wanted to preserve the ‘J.D.’, but the Donald had to go. He’s only been known as ‘J.D. Vance’ – sometimes with dots, sometimes without – since 2014, when he changed his name to honour ...”

“... these things. Djokovic has won the most slams (24 to Nadal’s 22 and Federer’s 20) and held the number one ranking for the longest period (428 weeks in total). He also has a leading head-to-head record against the other two. But Federer has the most titles overall (103 to Djokovic’s 100 and Nadal’s 92) and the most at Wimbledon, the tournament ...”

“... people who happen to carry their genes today have no moral right to repossess Neanderthal fossils held in museums. Part of the muddle stems from the seductive analogy between peoples and species. Evolutionary theory undoes the notion that a species might remain fixed over the very long term, a point that Qureshi makes beautifully in her description of the ...”

“... loomed over her in the second debate. By figures on both the right and the left, Clinton was held to be more responsible for her husband’s policies than he was, more responsible for the war in Iraq than the rarely mentioned Bush administration, responsible for Obama’s policies as though he had carried out her agenda rather than she his. The ...”

“... in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the Falklands War, of being shelled: ‘They must be mad. Don’t they know it’s very unsafe shooting things at other people?’ A US Sergeant in Vietnam recalled: ‘You thought, “How the fuck can they do this to ...”

“... opponent was saying exhibited the profound conviction of his own beliefs. Did not the poet King David say: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward and put to confusion, that desire my hurt’? Individualism, bordering on eccentricity, even to the extent of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’, has ...”

“... a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’. (According to a Defense Department consultant, US intelligence has long known ...”