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“... out of line. Enter Muhammad Ali, who over the next few years was to change the face of boxing. David Remnick’s book in fact concentrates on the two astonishing fights Ali had with Liston (Ali won the title in the first and defended it successfully in the second), and on the relationship between Ali, Liston and Patterson. For Remnick, as for most ...”

“... This is literally the case in its most emphatic use of the diagrid, its design for a Palace of Peace (2004-) in Kazakhstan. A pyramid, clad in stone, the apex of which is made up of stained-glass diagrids, this palace is the planned venue for the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions. In prior affirmations of modernity, too, there was ...”

“... liked Germany and negotiated the concordat did not mean, however, that he was a crypto-Nazi. As David Kertzer concludes in his new book, ‘Pope Pius XII was certainly not “Hitler’s Pope” … In many ways, the Nazi regime was anathema to the pope and to virtually all those around him in the Vatican. They were alarmed by the Reich’s efforts to weaken ...”

“... to have their dreams interpreted. Messiahs turned up roughly once a century. In 1523, it was David Reubeni, a traveller who claimed to be David, son of Solomon, and had some success touring his act around Italy: he left Rome in a flutter of glittering streamers, embroidered with the words of the Ten Commandments in ...”

“... district from infecting the rest of the town. Using a bare minimum of thuggery, he kept the peace. Karabas seldom carried a gun. Everyone looked up to him, and levels of violence stayed lower in Odessa than in other Russian and Ukrainian cities. His murderers were probably Chechens hired to break Odessa’s grip on the local oil industry, a grip coveted ...”

“... Unionists as parochial know-nothings. Revisionist historians, most prominently Ian McBride and David Livingstone, have demonstrated that the history of Ulster Presbyterianism from the 18th century is characterised by intellectual richness, an openness to science, a commitment to progress and a taste for theological heterodoxy, notwithstanding backwoods ...”

“... Journalism) to more than 90 per cent of all the deaths in drone strikes (the ex-military officers David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum). In March 2012, the New York Times reported that all military-age males, armed or unarmed, are considered to be combatants unless there is posthumous evidence proving otherwise; the Obama administration recently disputed ...”

“... changing her Facebook profile to honour him. In 2019, Bill Gates ignored a letter from three Nobel Peace Prizewinners, including Iran’s Shirin Ebadi, protesting against his decision to ‘give a humanitarian award to a man whose nickname is the “Butcher of Gujarat”’. In January, Twitter and YouTube agreed to enforce the Indian government’s ban on the ...”

“... and just wanted to dance.’ A total of 836 people were arrested, mostly for breach of the peace and drug offences. Only eight were eventually charged; one DJ, Rob Tissera, was sentenced to three months for inciting a riot and the ‘dishonest abstraction of electricity’. The raid capped two years of escalating tension between ravers and the ...”

“... ostensibly more ‘peaceful’, was taking place on the ground. A survey conducted in 2002 by Peace Now asked 3200 Jewish families from the West Bank and Gaza to justify their move to the Occupied Territories. A decisive majority, 77 per cent of the 270,000 settlers in question, stated that they moved for ‘quality of life’ reasons: bigger ...”

“... the lava descending ‘along its majestic fiery path’. The drama of the display, set against the peace of the surrounding fields, suggested the extremes of existence that were to recur in Faust. Two years later, with the fall of the Bastille, poets, artists and cartoonists had a ready image to deploy and, coming the year after Britain joined the ...”

“... knew the Old Testament. Upavon’s chapel is called the Cave of Adullam, the stronghold where David sought refuge from Saul’s armies (1 Samuel), presumably as a reminder of the persecution suffered by dissenters; Little Zoar, near Calne, is evidence of the fortress mentality of those strict Calvinists among the Baptists who believed that only the Elect ...”

“... Sebastopol, with its wash of grey sky over a stack of black landscape, is reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich, the town at its centre tiny, visible only in matchstick detail. Elsewhere Crimea, under the unforgiving sun, is rendered lunar, or Martian – pitted, rubbly, leached of shade, the scrub on the cliffs like spotted mould. Fenton made an ...”

“... of its visual tricks (tricks?). It was one thing for Tolstoy to describe mighty battles in War and Peace but it was absurd, in the era of celluloid, for novelists to attempt such a feat when the cinema could do the job so much better. The novel should find a new function for itself. Back to James Joyce, in a way, who opened the first cinema in Dublin in ...”

“... government.’ The media rallied to his call, and so did less likely allies. The novelist David Grossman went on TV to urge a ‘unity government’ of Likud and Blue and White. ‘Hatred will wait for better days … we need an emergency unity government now,’ Aviv Geffen, a rock star and once a leading ...”