“... Architectural​ plans are often issued with the instruction: ‘build to match existing.’ It means what it says: make something new look like what is – or was – already there. Build to match the existing kitchen cabinets. Build to match the existing decking. Build to match what remains of the house after the roof and the dining room wall were ripped off during Hurricane Laura, one of the strongest to have made landfall in Louisiana ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the prospective reader – not intended for gossip or virtuosic displays of wit. Rather, it was a means to keep him on track, a kind of corrective through self-scrutiny. This examination was sometimes scathing. In November 1888, he wrote:Your head has an odd shape, as if sculpted with great strokes of the chisel, almost like a man of genius. Your brow catches ...”

“... of Screen and Macmillan, for whom film history was too often an abstract History focused on the means of production rather than the contribution, say, of a given producer (a bourgeois individual). It is only with the redrawing of cultural-political attitudes in the Eighties, and the growth of video, that a less doctrinaire interest in the cinema has revived ...”

“... saw a poster facing me. Executed in yellow and black, it was a combined logo featuring the Star of David, the Islamic star and crescent, the Roman Catholic cross and the more elaborate cruciform of the Serbian and Bosnian Orthodox. Gens una summus,read the superscription. ‘We are one people’. Here, rendered in iconographic terms, was the defiant remnant of ...”

“... I look in the index of books on either sensibility or sentiment, and if there is no reference to David Hartley I close the volume. G.J. Barker-Benfield passes the test – his index lists Hartley as well as Shaftesbury, Hume, Adam Smith and, of course, Locke, for even the non-philosophical usually know that a brief reference to Locke must be ...”

“... and the shouts about autocratic behaviour. At best, the activists see negotiations as war by other means, designed to culminate in a ‘transfer of power’. The ANC leadership and returning exiles make heroic efforts to coax the grassroots into line, but even the credibility of the SACP is strained by its advocacy of ‘guarantees for the bourgeoisie’ When ...”

“... of history to those feeble fictions which do not even know that that is what they are. Ideology means Marxism (and especially that ‘erring colleague’, Christopher Hill), but Elton reserves some of his ammunition for the alternative, liberal determinists, Arnold Toynbee, Sir John Plumb, J.H. Hexter, while not forgetting that morally admirable but ...”

“... from the politicians, often phrased in demagogic and racialist language and mostly, but by no means exclusively, from the right. There was the famous ‘riot’ in Notting Hill in 1958, which was dubiously typecast as a race riot. At the same time, there had been a long history of agitation, originating with the Nazi persecution of the Jews and associated ...”

“... had been subverted by blogs, satellite phones and even the mobile phone; YouTube provided the means to expose in the most graphic and immediate way the crimes and violence of security forces. In March 2011 mass arrests and torture effortlessly crushed the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain. Innovations in information technology may have changed the odds ...”

“... in the great theatre of belonging. In the United States, to stay is an end in itself and not a means: to stay is the founding myth of this society.’ Over time, the stories of the children she interviews form one larger story. The majority of the children are escaping gang violence. Someone begins following them home from school, or leaving threatening ...”

“... of the same Eighties vintage: Atari and Nintendo video games, Airfix models, Tintin and Asterix, David Attenborough’s Life on Earth, Warner Brothers cartoons, The Waltons and The A-Team, the film Zombie Flesh-Eaters. The novel begins in Bangkok’s backpackers’ quarter, the Khao San Road, ‘a decompression chamber for those about to leave or enter ...”

“... Robert Nichols’ or ‘Letter to S.S. from Mametz Wood’ Graves explicitly figures poetry as a means of temporarily blocking out the terrors of combat. Graves’s other means of escape from the brutalities of both school and the battlefield were his romantic feelings for a boy three years younger than himself whom he ...”

“... veils’. At her best, she combines religious mysticism with visual clarity as dramatically as David Jones – though one feels she would be at her best more often in a lower key. Carolyn Forché, like Stainer, tackles some very ambitious subjects. In fact, throughout The Angel of History we find nothing but ambitious subjects – Hiroshima, the ...”

“... still young, on a day he remembered less well than the day his pet dog died. The family had few means and the young Slovo left school at 14. He joined the Party as soon as he could and it became his family: the affectionate pictures he paints of the characters of the Jewish Left are recognisably family portraits, such as that of the Trotskyist ...”