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“... into the UK, at least for a period of time. The nature of Britain’s economy and labour market means that immigration law cannot be cleanly separated from issues of employment, welfare, health and education. One of the dangers of the ‘hostile environment’ policy is that it deliberately collapses the distinction between judicial due process and ...”

“... to address the pain. His partner, L., who is Spanish and ‘has a European sense of what it means to be ill’, urges him to see a doctor, but he refuses. The first summer of the Covid pandemic is not a time to go to the emergency room. And the narrator is wary of the American health system, where ‘doctors waste your money and your time, and send you ...”

“... contacts with culture. How cunning to choose a place that is impossible to reach by any existing means of transport, other than the crawl through the Blackwall Tunnel (where a single misdirected lorry, trying to pick up time in the fast lane, can get trapped by prophylactic stalactites, and bring London to a standstill). I’d been to the Millennium ...”

“... West and Ecclesiastes) is given a round of applause. The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish waiter.’ Waiting at the lights this afternoon my bike slips out of my hands and slides to ...”

“... where instability and rivalry are the order of everyday life, war is still diplomacy by other means and there ‘is no deterrent to war as a rational instrument of state policy’. In Yugoslavia, we see these two worlds in collision, the logic of the first confronting the logic of the second in a struggle which is unlikely to be the last of its kind. We ...”

“... Crawford, an IFS economist, quoted in the FT: ‘For the Ministry of Defence an 18 per cent cut means something on the scale of no longer employing the army.’ The FT then extrapolates: At the transport ministry, an 18 per cent reduction would take out more than a third of the department’s grant to Network Rail; a 24 per cent reduction is about ...”

“... presumably, many straight readers. Perhaps a few more gay male writers – Paul Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Bailey, Adam Mars-Jones in Britain – enjoy this crossover status. International comparisons, however, can be misleading, since they disguise the very different ways in which each country is ...”

“... Kazuo Ishiguro, British in all but name, has not lived in Nagasaki since he was a toddler; David Mitchell left Hiroshima four years ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset ...”

“... that estimate. Yet there was no historical evidence or conceivable future state in which the means of subsistence could long support this sexually-powered expansion. Malthus believed that, despite our most strenuous efforts, food resources can only grow in an arithmetic progression (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), with population invariably expanding to soak up ...”

“... new recruits inspired by the example of Khomeini himself. Hizbullah ‘had two progenitors’, David Hirst wrote in his seminal book on Lebanon, Beware of Small States (2010). ‘If Iran was one – with Syria, so to speak, as midwife – Israel was unquestionably the other. Iran furnished the model and the means, Syria ...”

“... for a Scottish Parliament, which was increasingly presented by Labour and others as not only a means of reversing deindustrialisation and reducing unemployment, but of doing so as an expression of Scotland’s authentic left-wing soul. It was assumed that a self-governing Scotland would lurch to the left, perhaps radically so.Over the first two decades of ...”

“... and dearth. As Clausewitz might have said, shooting wars are trade wars carried on by other means. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, for instance, came after the tsar quit the Continental Blockade. Through the Middle Ages, there seems to have been a presumption that unimpeded, if not untaxed, trade was a good thing. The door needed to be kicked open now ...”

“... and after, with reminiscences by various advertisements for the system, including Kenneth Clarke, David Puttnam and Barry Hines. Listening to their recollections of taking and passing the eleven-plus makes me wonder whether I ever took it at all. I had jumped one or two classes at my primary school so by July 1944 when I left to go to secondary school, I was ...”

“... engage in a colloquy at a crucial moment of modern history – people like the educationalist David Hare, the Anglo-Portuguese poet and teacher Henry Derozio, the great Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. If Kipling had been born fifty years earlier, it would have been impossible for him to write the cheerfully assonantal but bleak lines: ‘O East is ...”

“... of post-Rylean anti-Cartesians in chronological order – Wilfrid Sellars, J.J.C. Smart, David Armstrong, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Donald Davidson, Ruth Millikan, Patricia and Paul Churchland – one gets a clear sense of a developing consensus. There is increasing agreement about which moves will and won’t work, which strategies are dead and ...”