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“... Mexico. The pieces can be juggled almost at random. Still, the apparent evacuation of Syria was major news, and it hogged the headlines very satisfactorily. It was, he said on Twitter, ‘time for us to get out’ and let others ‘figure the situation out’. Believers might see this as a first step in Trump’s design – announced in the 2016 campaign ...”

“... myths, and is temperamentally a northern island or isthmus dweller. In that respect he’s like John Burnside, to whom he dedicated his best poem so far, ‘At Roane Head’ (LRB, 14 August 2008), in which there is not just a selkie at the bottom of the garden but there might be a selkie in the bedroom that could cuckold you, or make you kill your children ...”

“... liberation. Despite this, Garvey was taken up by the religion as a divinely inspired prophet, the John the Baptist of Rastafari. By 1940, he too was in England. Haile Selassie declined an invitation to meet him. Garvey died that year, a fact that many of his unwanted followers refused to believe, and since Haile Selassie’s reported demise in 1975 his own ...”

“... the skills she had developed in earlier work on coal. Subsequently, the director of the unit, John Randall, decided to hand over to her the project that Maurice Wilkins, aided by Raymond Gosling, a doctoral student, had begun – the structural analysis of DNA. Wilkins learned of this only when he returned from overseas to find that his project had been ...”

“... for small reward he was teaching me geography in Edinburgh) and Robin Robertson, or the Irishman John F. Deane, or now the American Patty Crane. They were drawn by the small vocabulary, the short sentences, the largely transferable word-order, the language that seems to pay twenty shillings to the pound – darkness, stone, light, tree, cold. You feel the ...”

“... There were, it turned out, intimate connections between the Abu Ghraib scandal and the Rasul case: Major General Geoffrey Miller, for example, the architect of Guantanamo, also helped to shape procedures at the various detention and interrogation facilities in Iraq. More generally, Abu Ghraib served as a window, one of the few we have had so far, into the ...”

“... and Expressionism; in the readymade and in Dada’s exploitation of industrial raw materials (John Heartfield’s political photomontages would have been impossible without collage); and even Abstract Expressionism (as Clement Greenberg argued, the little pockets of ‘depth’ that pucker the surfaces of Cubist paintings presage the hills and crannies in ...”

“... bouts of illness, contributing to the dispatch and defeat of a British force at Coruña under Sir John Moore. Canning genuinely believed that the war would be lost unless Castlereagh was removed. He was generally supported in this view but was balked by the indecisiveness of the prime minister, the 71-year-old Duke of Portland, a favourite of George III. This ...”

“... among the English middle classes, the early 20th century was a more genteel time than the 1750s. John Somerville, a youngish English archaeologist, digging in Mesopotamia in the spring of 1914, thinks he may have discovered evidence that would definitively resolve a number of uncertainties in the history of the late Assyrian Empire. Since those uncertainties ...”

“... was a pioneer of legal simplification, mixed polities and defence of civil liberties, and a major influence upon the American constitution. His views on penology were far more lenient and humane than those of Bentham himself; and his famous remark, ‘everything is now as it should be,’ is shown to have referred, not, as Bentham implied, to the ...”

“... are of the Lords’. To be sure, even before the transmutation of the sub-working-class Mr Major into a Tory prime minister, to insist on the crippling effects of class distinction upon British society was the mark of a sociology excessively superficial even for that trade, of a naivety excessively American even for Americans. All sorts of statistics ...”

“... prisoners held by Israel. Over the first six weeks, the Israeli army would withdraw from major population centres and humanitarian aid would be allowed in. Air operations over the strip would be suspended for ten hours a day. During two subsequent phases the remaining captives would be exchanged, and the details of a permanent ceasefire would be ...”

“... love. The book begins with Mimi – whose husband is in India for work – hosting a party for Mrs John D. Rockefeller III, ‘president of the Museum of Modern Art’, in her tastefully furnished home. At the party she encounters Tom Potts, an assistant of Mrs Rockefeller’s, and becomes infatuated. Potts knows where to buy Hermès scarves and bags at a ...”

“... an evolutionary advantage. Schutt compares their emergence to ‘a farmer moving into town with a John Deere tractor while everyone else is using horse-drawn ploughs’. Pretty quickly – at least in evolutionary terms – fish jaws were bristling with teeth. Some long and thin fish even evolved an additional set of pharyngeal jaws inside their ...”

“... the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which has not so much reflected as created major political change; and thirdly because nothing is certain until it has been attempted. In Britain the push, or perhaps the drift, towards a written constitution is becoming more perceptible, partly in consequence of the work of pressure groups and partly ...”