“... looked over the Nile to the east and Gezira Sporting Club to the west. I learned to count to ten by timing the sunset each night, the sand in the air making the sun a scumbled, smouldering ball, dropping fast and heavily, as if overcome by its own heat. My father had gone ahead of us and been to the Mouski to buy Persian ...”

“... a strong feeling that my body was dealing with something unfamiliar. I was lucky: it turned out to be the ‘mild to moderate’ version of Covid. But it wasn’t much fun. I had the semi-delirious sense that my body knew it was dealing with a new illness. I would feel OK and then not OK, in waves. The image that stuck in my mind that week was of being in a ...”

“... One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted – One need not be a House – The Brain has Corridors – surpassing Material Place – ‘All men say “What” to me,’ Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She certainly mystified Higginson ...”

“... I remember being struck in the late 1970s by the vigour of gay culture in the American marketplace. Two novels were selling strongly and being urgently discussed: one was lyrical and would-be Proustian (Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance); the other was bilious and aspired to satire (Larry Kramer’s Faggots ...”

“... two thousand people attacked the British Embassy. An IRA bomb exploded during the official opening by the Queen of the Sullom Voe oil terminal. Sitting in my college in Cambridge, I was thinking that perhaps the Provos were right after all, that the stupid inflexibility of ‘the Brits’, with their obsessive determination to remain in Ireland, was the source ...”

“... insanely cool new search engine, wanted to incorporate it as a company, and needed to find a name. David Vise, in his breezy book The Google Story, tells how they came up with one. A fellow graduate student suggested to Page and Brin that they use the name given to what is sometimes, erroneously or metaphorically, called the largest number, 10100: google. They ...”

“... 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the IAEA’s agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration protected it ...”

“... You’d think it would be prime-time viewing. A Frenchwoman, a survivor of Hitler’s death camps, helps an ingenious young Dutch Socialist to outwit the Scrooge-like Establishment. Hundreds of millions of pounds are at stake. The rank-and-file defy the mighty. Law confronts power. Three Governments risk being taken to court ...”

“... that he opposed ‘a like-for-like Trident replacement’ and suggested that ‘the money would be better spent on frontline military operations.’ Clegg described Trident as a Cold War weapon, and added: ‘the world has changed.’ Chris Huhne, the energy secretary and, like Clegg, a member of Britain’s new National Security Council, went further in ...”

“... to the biggest question, the one on the referendum ballot for 18 September: ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’ We preferred the question-slogan of the Poles during their 123-year struggle to regain independence: ‘Poland yes – but what sort of Poland?’ ‘What sort of Scotland?’ Will Storrar, our organiser, went to Homebase in Wick and ...”

“... country would buy the pavilion on completion. The first to do so was Belgium, in 1907, followed by Hungary, Britain and Bavaria (now the German pavilion) in 1909, and the French and Swedish pavilions in 1912 (the latter was given to the Netherlands when the Swedes failed to pay). After the First World War came Spain, Czechoslovakia, the US, Greece and ...”

“... Why ‘earthlings’​ ? David Miller isn’t drawing a contrast with justice for creatures from outer space. Nor is he taking issue directly with Ronald Dworkin’s ‘justice for hedgehogs’ in Dworkin’s book of 2011 with that title, although Miller does say in a footnote that he disagrees with him. He has in his sights the ‘neo-Augustinians’, as he calls them, like the late G ...”

“... of hundreds waged in Britain and the empire with posters, leaflets and films throughout the war. By turns advisory, exhortatory or simply informative they were generally more stoical than bellicose and often humorous. David Welch’s account is based on the Central Office of Information archive in the British Library, with ...”

“... referendum – the Electoral Commission considered ‘Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?’ too much of a leading question – but he did at least make sure that his side would be fighting for a ‘yes’. The campaign to legalise abortion in Ireland, which won with a thumping ...”

“... foot four, Wilson was an imposing figure. In 1886, on imperial service in Burma, he was attacked by local bandits, hostile to colonial rule, with a long, sharp knife used for cutting bamboo. The wound left a permanent scar over his right eye which caused his face to droop. His four-year term as chief of the imperial general staff, the most senior military ...”