“... 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 ...”

“... of former colleagues around to point out mis-statements or lacunae. Mind you, this convention may be changing: one can imagine the kind of history of the Times of the 1980s Rupert Murdoch would be likely to commission, or pass. It is hard to see him frightened by the prospect of hostile reviews: ‘Murdoch Loses Sleep over Bias ...”

“... Shawcross concentrated on international intervention, from the American bombing ordered by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to the uses of international aid and sanctions during the Vietnamese occupation. Martin, on the other hand, has spent her career dissecting Cambodian society from within, always using a French historical framework. When she ...”

“... canonical works of black male autobiography that have surely shaped Gates’s political thinking, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, for instance, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and No Name in the Street, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Colored People is not an angry, still less an incendiary work; its predominant tone is nostalgic and ...”

“... Fréa gave up a job in publishing to protest at Fairmile. Dale gave up nursing and Richard gave up managing a mental health phone-line. Many sign on, but many others choose not to. Going against the grain of consumerism, these renunciants have discovered that there can be power in poverty. At the Rio Earth Summit, a US delegate warned that ...”