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“... Sometimes​ there’s nothing more useful than bad news. So when it was confirmed at the start of September that Canada’s economy was in recession, the leaders of the opposition parties were turning cartwheels on their way to the stump. ‘The news that is consuming Ottawa today is old hat to Canadians across the country,’ declared Justin Trudeau, the Liberal Party’s youthful leader and the son of Canada’s long-serving prime minister Pierre Trudeau ...”

“... Earlier​ this summer, pandemic restrictions in Canada began to loosen and my wife, Beth, and I decided to take a trip to British Columbia to visit family and friends we hadn’t seen in eighteen months. At the end of June a devastating heat dome – caused when high pressure clamps hot air over a region for days or weeks – struck western North America, overturning countless temperature records and sparking hundreds of wildfires ...”

“... Caroline Lucas​ became the Green Party’s first MP when she won Brighton Pavilion in 2010. Two years later she resigned as leader of the party in England and Wales and was replaced by Natalie Bennett. In 2011, the Greens took minority control of Brighton and Hove City Council, and in 2013 Jenny Jones, who has represented the Greens in the London Assembly since 2000, became a peer in the House of Lords ...”

“... The​ top-down story of 1980s finance is familiar enough, but Amy Edwards offers a different account, arguing that our focus on the political history of the 1980s has come at the expense of understanding economic and social change. All kinds of historical development have been attributed to Thatcher’s assertion of state power, but it has become increasingly clear that Thatcherism was the beneficiary as much as the agent of these changes ...”

“... At​ the height of spy mania during the First World War, two British agents were sent to East Anglia in a car fitted with a Marconi radio receiver. Their aim was to intercept illicit messages crossing the sea. ‘They left London at noon,’ Basil Thomson, then head of the Met’s Criminal Investigation Department, later recalled in Queer People (1922 ...”

“... popping up, some of them seriously overestimating Upham’s importance by listing him alongside Ben Bernanke or Alvin Roth. Wood tracked down Venture Cap’s head office: the address was for a back entrance next to an Indian restaurant in Manhattan. He had found his way into the world of reputation management firms. There are hundreds of these groups ...”

“... In January​ 2011, Aaron Swartz was arrested for downloading 4.8 million academic articles from the digital archive JSTOR, using a laptop hidden in a broom cupboard on the MIT campus. He was 24, and already a respected and influential computer programmer. As a teenager, he had helped develop RSS, a syndication format that led to the explosion in popularity of blogging, and Markdown, an easy to use tool that converted text to HTML ...”

“... If you know​ anything about Magnus Carlsen, you probably know that he is supposed to be making chess cool. Before he was twenty, he was the subject of two books and a film; in the years since – he’s now 28 and the world’s best chess player – he has been one of Cosmopolitan’s sexiest men and one of Time’s hundred most influential. He is imposingly good-looking; it’s impossible not to be impressed by his quiff, even if his face always looks slightly swollen, as if he’s coming off an especially bad night’s sleep or a mild allergic reaction ...”

“... North Sea oil, resentment over the poll tax, the closure of the Ravenscraig steelworks. Ben Jackson’s intricate account of the intellectual development of Scottish nationalism marks a highly original departure from the norm, and allows us to distinguish the various progressive themes that have since the 1960s enriched and transformed the ...”

“... interests and institutions successfully targeted trade unionists as the enemy within (by Ben Jackson). None of the essays has much truck with grand theory; their authors are no more likely to cite the contributors to the Joyce volume than vice versa; the collection is as miscellaneous as the volume for Stedman Jones. But a higher proportion of ...”

“... and at present a praiser of his own past.’ No wonder that two veteran Joyceans, John Wyse Jackson of the Chelsea Press, editor of Flann O’Brien and Oscar Wilde, and the Dublin social historian Peter Costello, should have been inspired to produce a full-length biography of, so to speak, Our Founder. It is in its way a unique undertaking. Hard to ...”

“... joining him on the Vote for Change tour of battleground states include R.E.M., James Taylor and Jackson Browne, with the Dixie Chicks – whose lead singer, Natalie Maines, got into trouble for saying that they were ashamed of George W. Bush’s Texas connections, though she later apologised for the remark – bringing some relative youth to the ...”

“... Prince Henry, and presided over an international and sophisticated court. With Shakespeare and Ben Jonson benefiting from extended seasons of royal revels, there was an increase in the number of plays commissioned and staged, as well as ‘more imaginative and expensive’ masques, which celebrated a monarch who, Doran says, ‘arguably … did more to ...”

“... As Lahav says, Meir must have been aware of the work of the Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner, whose ‘frontier thesis’ saw settler colonialism as a defining feature of American progress. In May 1921, Meir and Morris travelled from New York to Italy on the USS Pocahontas. On a second boat from Brindisi to Egypt, they fell in with some ...”

“... a record label, bought the movie rights. The subsequent film, which starred Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, as well as Richard Pryor and Lena Horne, was a commercial and critical flop. But it became classic holiday viewing for many Black Americans, including my family. The Wiz is set in late 1970s New York, dingy and rundown, full of dilapidated tenements of ...”