While Britain participated in the slave trade, they went out of their way to not do so in Britain; the slaveholders kept their slaves abroad and out of sight, in places where the laws of civilisation which rule such institutions to be obscene are waived. (Sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean were one such place.) And it was impolite to inquire too hard about the sources of fortunes that built stately homes.

The difference being that when the N-word was uttered in Britain, it was belittling and condescending in an exoticising way, like a colonial-era picture book of funny foreigners in their traditional costumes. In America, however, it had a more immediate edge of aggression and violence, implying an other that’s here rather than far away, and firmly below the speaker in the established racial hierarchy, and who must be kept there using tools including designating them as a (N-word).

Based.

The word carried somewhat less of a charge in the UK at the time, where black people were relatively uncommon until waves of labour migration from the Caribbean in the 1950s, than in the US, where it was freighted with the weight of slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow laws and such. Agatha Christie could call a book “10 Little N_s”, alluding to a children’s rhyme. This was an age in which the children who casually sang that rhyme probably had golliwog dolls.

( looks at harried, sleep-deprived parent wrangling four squawling children into a minivan) “This person fucks.”

Always has been.

The USSR from the Stalin era onwards had world-leading biological and chemical weapons programmes, largely due to having plenty of test subjects in the gulag system.

Slava ukraini!

Not only a serial killer but also a cat burglar, pickpocket, arsonist and numerous other crimes. A regular Doktorin Mabuse.

“Here I will confess that I was anticipating the Schwebebahn to be a novelty, more of a gimmick than a real transit route, like Los Angeles’s Angels Flight funicular or San Francisco’s cable cars… I was immediately proven incorrect”

Tell me you’re American without saying you’re American.

Well, women want fish (and me fear me)

The Price Of Freedom is about to go up steeply

That’ll only work until the Mormons retroactively baptise it to have been LDS all along.

Is 1900 a record?

Where is your god now?

If the word “motorbike” didn’t exist and a name was needed for them, they’d probably be called thundercocks

Soon after this, you start seeing more ads for alcohol, gambling sites and religious cults, as the algorithm flags you as a potentially lucrative prospect.

The only thing a true Melburnian would use instant coffee for

True, though I do wish that the spontaneous penile-inadequacy-syndrome support group that regularly meet on my street at all hours of the day didn’t have their gender-affirming motorbikes.

The Nazis also aimed to wipe out Roma and Sinti people, though there were fewer of them than Jews and they tended to be socially marginalised. Other non-“Aryan” ethnicities were targeted for enslavement rather than outright extermination.

Nude models from the 1890s when someone’s gaze lingers on their daguerreotypes slightly too long in an antiquarian shop.

The Russians really need to cut down on smoking in hazardous environments