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“... a tactful intimation that some judges no longer find this appropriate. How has this come about? Richard II in 1396 enacted that ‘no lord nor other of the county, little or great, shall sit upon the bench with the justices to take assizes,’ evidently because local grandees were doing it and it wasn’t acceptable. I owe this information, let me say, not ...”

“... of purpose. Such books were not always very attractive or even very interesting, though we may learn to miss them just because their elevation already seems old-fashioned. Last year, the prize’s new sponsors let it be known that it was time for a shiny new populism, and so far the judges have concurred. Neither prize-winner, under the new regime, has ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... way. First, though, he wrote a tremendously bad novel called The Dwarves of Death (1990), which may be a source of embarrassment: there’s no book called ‘The Midgets of Mortality’ on Michael Owen’s fictional CV. The Dwarves of Death is definitely interested in pop music, demotic and storytelling, but it’s a throwaway effort that seems to have been ...”

“... live – to seem to forget you – it is to feed my pain – and so that this seeming forgetting may spring forth more painfully in tears, at a given moment, in the midst of this life, when you appear to me in it * time – that body takes to obliterate itself in earth – (to merge little by little with neutral earth on the vast horizons) it is then that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... served in a number of ministerial roles before losing his seat in 2019; and the attorney general, Richard Hermer KC, a barrister appointed from full-time practice at Matrix Chambers.The published list of ministerial appointments included an asterisk against the outsiders’ names with a footnote recording that the king intended to confer on each a peerage for ...”

“... appetite for abstraction and the fastidiousness that marked much of his work thereafter:We may consider every cloud a lakeTransmogrified, its character unselfed,At once a whale and a white wedding cakeBellowed into conspicuous ectoplasm.It is a lake’s ghost that goes voyaging.The book received measured but disappointing reviews (‘many of the poems ...”

“... from extreme depression is something which we can reasonably believe. The word ‘depression’ may cause the reader to pause. We need, as it were, to shake ourselves in order to be clear in our minds that the richly learned word ‘melancholy’ could be used to refer to anything as simply distressing, as unglamorously desolate as depression. To be ...”

“... of Charles Hamilton and his works that Coker was derived in part from Hamilton’s elder brother Richard, whose Christian name provided the famous pseudonym, and who, quite clearly, was anything but a lout in the eyes of the author. And there’s a Cliff House character named Dolly whom Drotner persists in calling Jolly, as though to superimpose mood over ...”