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“... The hotel​ where I worked was called the Mykonos Grace. It was a whitewashed stucco building of 32 rooms. Most went for hundreds of euros a night – around what each of the staff made in a month. The cheapest rooms were at street level. An angry French couple once uploaded a video to TripAdvisor of every truck that rumbled past their room over the course of an afternoon ...”

“... There’s a town​ south of Budapest that Hungarians call Görögfalva, ‘Greek village’. Its official name is Beloiannisz, after Nikos Beloyannis, a communist commander in the Greek Civil War. After the left’s defeat in 1949, some Greek communists fled to Yugoslavia, others to Central Asia; a handful built this settlement just outside the Great Hungarian Plain ...”

“... In Kalamata I introduce myself as an American neo-fascist with a strong interest in Greek history. Sceptically at first, later with fervour, a few members of the Golden Dawn invite me to attend meetings. Their offices tend to be located off main squares, usually in residential buildings in quiet neighbourhoods. Large Greek flags hang on the walls, along with news clippings and redrawn maps: Greece in possession of Skopje and bits of Bulgaria, Greece in possession of northern Turkey, Greece in possession of Cyprus and southern Albania ...”

“... Hey it’s Sandra from the bar how are you?’ ‘Pig butchering’ begins with a text message like this; millions of them are sent every day. If you’ve ever received such a message, it’s likely that, in common with most potential pigs, you didn’t respond. But perhaps you did, and proceeded to get fattened up. ‘You seem so polite and friendly,’ one version of the conversation runs ...”

“... much idea who controlled the organisation – many aspirationally speculated that it might be Tsar Alexander. A year after its foundation in 1814, it had no more than fifty members.Few moments in Europe’s history have seemed less conducive to the success of a secret society conspiring for ‘national liberation’. The Pentarchy ...”

“... In August​ 2011, a Montenegrin sailor called Goran Radoman fled the scene of a late-night car crash in Havana. He was arrested three months later at José Martí International Airport and sentenced to seven years in prison for manslaughter. According to the Serbian TV channel Insajder, the highest levels of the Serbian state lobbied the Cuban government for Radoman’s extradition – Montenegro doesn’t have an embassy in Havana – and by late December 2013 he was on a plane to Belgrade, although five years remained on his prison sentence ...”

“... spent their off-season studying the game of the faux-populists, and now have them in their sights. Alexander Clapp Hungary and the Czech RepublicMembership of the EU has allowed several hundred thousand Hungarians to escape by emigration the increasingly punitive conditions of life under Viktor Orbán. One of the most striking features of Hungary since ...”

“... place to another to exploit that difference. You can even make a business out of it.Waste Wars, Alexander Clapp’s new book, is about such businesses. In the 1980s, waste became a national export across much of the global North. Since then, firms have made vast amounts of money by sending the rich world’s waste to the global South. At first, the ...”

“... after her death. Narrative power was what animated the best of her writing. According to Susannah Clapp, it was what she admired in Shakespeare, whose plays she read like novels, enjoying the ‘bland’ lines that moved the action on, such as ‘a ship has come from France.’ Like Shakespeare, Carter was adept at borrowing plots. The Bloody Chamber was not ...”

“... which she would have enjoyed. The Tories have been getting into tangles. Her eight-year-old son Alexander has invented an amiably malevolent game called Killer Baby. And Angela Carter has turned into a celebrity. Her reputation has soared like her trapeze-artist heroine Fevvers, the ‘Cockney Venus’ of Nights at the Circus, ‘shaking out about her those ...”

“... restricted attitudes of all the judges. First, Dame Helen was the wife of Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Penrose Cumming of Altyre, who had inherited the Gordonstoun estate: those who found against her did so with reluctance and regret. Her guardianship of Jane Cumming was thought to overcome even the disability of illegitimacy, while the testimony of a ...”

“... was on secondment, as they used to say at the BBC. The real deputy editor was Oleg Kerensky, Alexander Kerensky’s grandson. The connection with world history made the thought of the job even more alluring – something to report to my father. The war had been the Listener’s heyday; in the 1940s it had a circulation of 100,000 or more; and, like the ...”

“... shovel badge. There are bundles of postcards, including the ones sent over the years to Susannah Clapp, the friend and editor Carter would appoint as her literary executor, which formed the basis of the memoir Clapp published in 2012; there’s also one with an illegible postmark, addressed to Bonny Angie Carter and signed ...”