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“... side of the family with his father’s sense of himself as a would-be wealthy person.Scenes of the young Biden ingratiating himself to Republicans recur during a youth spent winging it, hustling, and depending on the kindness of a series of characters who, in the words of his letters of recommendation, took ‘a chance’ on him despite his ‘lousy ...”

“... Ta-Nehisi Coates put it in Between the World and Me.1 In the face of repeated police shootings of young black men or atrocities such as the church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, Obama did little more than deliver one of his formidable speeches. And – as he did in Charleston – sing ‘Amazing Grace’, as if only a higher power could cure America ...”

“... took himself off to the Normandy coast, where he was amused to find the hotel full of ‘very young rosy-faced English officers on leave with nice young French ladies who clumsily pretend in broken English to be their wives’. This ‘bon ville’ was Cabourg, Proust’s Balbec. Channon dined with Princesse ...”

“... prevent it. Six months earlier, Vivienne’s mother had cancelled her daughter’s engagement to a young man who had already been approved by her husband, and there was a good chance she would intervene again. She had reason to feel that marriage, and the possibility of offspring, were not advisable in her daughter’s case, given her history of recurrent ...”

“... much, partly through not having been brought up to it but also having had a duodenal ulcer as a young man, I suppose I feel disqualified, or somehow got at, as I did when I had to do a poetry reading for Amis in 1976, though then it was his self-consciously chappish manner I found hardest to cope with, never knowing if it was piss-taking quite. It’s ...”

“... civilian property, but not to overdo it. Rather than enforceability, the law appeals to what Michael Ignatieff aptly calls ‘the warrior’s honour’. The British Government’s accession to the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions illustrates the negotiated pragmatism of the laws of war. The Protocols were finalised in 1977, but it was only ...”

“... rid of the boiled oatmeal consistency of the bad verse of 1900, and there is no doubt that many young readers seeing Binyon’s inversions etc, will be likely to throw down the translation under the impression that it is incompetent.’ But this, he said, was to be short-sighted. ‘The fact that this idiom, which was never spoken on sea or land, is NOT fit ...”

“... our tried institutions with an openness to change when practical considerations prompted – what Michael Oakeshott later called ‘intimations’. The trouble is that Burke himself, like many other conservatives, tended in practice not to recognise such intimations. Nothing could have been more obvious than that rotten boroughs ought to be abolished and the ...”

“... She took blood samples from all of them back to America for analysis of their DNA and found a young scientist, James Gusella, who was eager to search for the gene, even though the chances of finding it seemed remote. Against all odds, however, he and his collaborators succeeded in locating it on one specific human chromosome, although no one has yet been ...”

“... The estate was sold ... great changes have been wrought/In all the neighbourhood’: the end of ‘Michael’, we are told, expresses an English experience ‘in danger of being not merely exploited but exterminated’. Massacres again! And it didn’t happen. The English genius – or so we used to be told – is for compromise: and over issues like dialects ...”

“... and alarms the audience on the final morning with a viewing of the video he designed for Michael Jackson’s ‘Scream’, the song Jackson released after the child abuse allegations fell away. Makela acknowledged that $7.5 million was a substantial amount of money for a five-minute video, but was consoled when Jackson donated $4 million worth of ...”

“... of those with Christian backgrounds who remain uncertain of New Labour’s merits, such as Michael Meacher, an Anglican and ex-Bennite, or the Old Labour heirs to Eric Heffer, a staunch Anglo-Catholic, or Tony Benn, an agnostic who nonetheless argues that ‘the moral roots of socialism lie in religion’ and that ‘political agitation is groundless ...”

“... Children of the Arbat is set in the early Thirties; the children of the title are a group of young people, acquaintances and friends, who live in and around the Arbat, that Moscow street which runs south-west from Arbat Square to Smolensk Square, between the inner, boulevard ring and the outer, garden ring, the main artery of a district – now mutilated ...”

“... instructor is devoted to for its spiritual dimensions, its ESP and UFO news) are so full of the young English nobility and their dangerous drug habits that they pick up in imitation of the rock stars, out of class guilt and a subconscious Marxist wish to destroy themselves I suppose.’ (Updike takes care to give Sarah just enough education to make that ...”

“... an adventure. I go into Stratford to look at the Swan, the new RSC auditorium. Its architect, Michael Reardon, has done a stunning job – almost literally, since the steep concentrated space feels physically violent. People talk about Blackfriars as its model, but Reardon says that when invited to fit a structure inside the old rehearsal rooms, he ...”