“... most reliable independent experts, ‘the most credible worst-case estimate’ is that the North may have between 6.3 and 8.5 kg of reprocessed plutonium. In other words, the CIA’s educated guess, endlessly repeated in the media, appears to have been mistaken. A less obvious consequence of this mistake has been its role in strengthening the North’s ...”

“... guests had their heels checked for explosives – this was well before the ‘shoe bomber’ Richard Reid tried to bring down an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami. The Chadian state used to be – in the words of the American anthropologist Janet Roitman – a ‘garrison-entrepôt’: a guarded storage facility for hoarders in one of the ...”

“... the Thames. On the Hudson the new Whitney Museum, conceived by Renzo Piano, will open its doors in May. Guided by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the Museum of Modern Art is planning another expansion (the last one was just ten years ago), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art will transform its modern wing by the end of the decade. I draw these examples from London ...”

“... what’s the use,’ in a few weeks writes a novel instead, and never looks back. It may all sound a little apocryphal or parabolic, but the novel was Frost, written in 1963, and in 2006 I translated it for Janeway. She described it (the commission, not the translation) as being from the ‘Achduschreck!’ – which I might translate as the ...”

“... in us.’ No folie de grandeur here, only an obsessive, mournful modesty: what we didn’t betray may not have been there anyway. Acrimony has a fine epigraph from Rilke, all about the unmeasured or the disproportionate, and how it piles up and hurls itself at us (‘so sehr ist überall das Ungemässe / und häuft sich an und stürzt sich uns ...”

“... his generation’ and terms like ‘Don Quixote’ have become labels almost universally used. He may be right, but it is worth remarking that Orwell’s friends took a different view of the obituary at the time. Almost every admiring phrase seems to contain its implicit qualification, so that Orwell was not just the conscience but the wintry conscience of ...”

“... evacuation to Canada during the war, the admiration for Gravesend’s original and idealistic MP Richard Acland, the bottomless contempt for his replacement, Victor Mischon, and his early days as a councillor and (fairly left-wing) union activist. His attitude to Mischon, who he thinks of as a smooth, ideal-free user of the Labour Party, is ...”

“... was the long, emotion-charged speech with which, as Israeli Ambassador, he acutely embarrassed Richard Nixon, who ‘sat mute with his eyes averted’. When his term as Chief of Staff was up, Rabin asked for the Washington Embassy, to the acute surprise of those who found it difficult to visualise him as a diplomat and despite the pain it must have caused ...”

“... their opponents in the propaganda war by a brilliant campaign of softening up the press. Richard Evans of the Times was quoted as saying of their Press Officer, Pat Edlin: ‘He was the best Press Officer I’ve ever come across. He made press men in Whitehall or the big companies look like beginners. He ought to give lessons in it.’ Shrewder and ...”

“... of Francis Spufford’s engaging new book calls them, meaning above all Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins – believe in spite of all evidence that eventually the religious will see sense. And yet with their magical belief in the truth of science – their taking for granted a consensus about the value of scientific evidence – and their unspoken ...”

“... of philosophical summary alternate with accounts of visits to Adolf Grünbaum in Pittsburgh, to Richard Swinburne in Oxford, to David Deutsch in Headington, to John Leslie in Canada, to Derek Parfit, again in Oxford. He meets Roger Penrose in New York, has phone conversations with Steven Weinberg and John Updike. These conversations become a way of evoking ...”

“... it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows.’ It was May Sinclair who applied the term ‘stream of consciousness’ to fiction (it’s unclear whether or not she had James’s definition in mind), in a review of the first three volumes of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage in 1918. Richardson wasn’t ...”

“... good or even brilliant in terms of historiography) falls into three camps: the conservative right (Richard Pipes), neoliberal right (Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder) or the cravenly apolitical centre (Timothy Colton). They all treat Russia as a problem to be solved. What is the underlying reason, they ask, for Russia’s deviance from the ...”

“... the creator saw further than the follower of Chatterton. However quaint the ‘slug-horn’ may seem in Chatterton’s ‘Battle of Hastings II’, it has a peculiar rightness in Browning’s poem. As Barry Tuckwell, its foremost living exponent, reminds us in his splendid new book, the horn began its history in utterance and has never shaken off its ...”

“... one of her brothers was the original of Charley’s Aunt. After Wilde’s disgrace and death she may have lost heart a little. But just as she had stood by her ruined friend, so she put a brave face on her marriage until Ernest, on the verge of bankruptcy, was sent away to Canada in the company of his illegitimate daughter, at the diamond merchant’s ...”