“... of the kind he usually visits on his readers. This time there is a ‘foreigner’s dream’ that may be a footnote, a preference or cold winds, a ‘countryman’ who may be a rustic or may be a compatriot of the foreigner who has the dream, and a ‘proper source’ that ...”

“... that to disparage the work – leg-pulls have an honoured place in modern art, and to suspect one may be intellectually preferable to a flight into allegory. Like Picasso, Hodgkin has his own technical alphabet and can do exactly as he pleases, as his brush pleases, according to his humour; it is, after all, the biggest of leg-pulls to kid us into believing ...”

“... and ancient and responsible for our most base behaviour, and that childhood nightmares of monsters may be traces of ancestral encounters with dinosaurs. (Like the idea that the heart is the centre of emotion, this seems to me a poetically precise description of a real phenomenon.) The connection of dopamine to addictive behaviour – Cobb cites a Facebook ...”

“... harsh and inviolable. Even Wilson’s feisty subject timed her pleasures to its unalterable rhythm.David Henkin sets out to discover how Americans became such creatures of the seven-day week. By the time the United States was founded as an independent republic, he writes, North Americans were already ‘by the contemporary standards of Europe … particularly ...”

“... Cheshire, he notices, now has a fancy knot garden ‘exactly reproducing what the Tudor Moretons may possibly have had, or if they didn’t, ought to have had’.And the men and women who inhabit this land of dead but re-imagined great houses do not, Lees-Milne recognises, all see them in the same way. In the epilogue to the book, he mourns that – although ...”

“... that there will always be ‘conflicts between one way of life and another’; that pacifism may promote war rather than prevent it, because it is more interested in giving the pacifist a clear conscience than in navigating the rough seas of actually existing hostilities; that deceit may sometimes be a political ...”

“... doing his best to avoid the hazards and collect the rewards. As the game progresses, the hazards may get harder to avoid, and the rewards increase accordingly. There may also be a number of puzzles to solve, but these aren’t strictly necessary. The first commercial game I played was Snapper, closely modelled on Pac-Man ...”

“... is a rule of law,’ Justice Berkeley said, ‘and a rule of government, and things that may not be done by the rule of law may be done by the rule of government.’ It took the rest of the 17th century – a civil war, the king’s execution, the implosion of the republic, the restoration of the monarchy and the ...”

“... of legal thought; but the argument of Jonathan Sumption’s 2019 Reith Lectures, delivered in May and June and now issued in book form, is more accommodating. It is that while law and due process have their place, they owe considerably more respect to the political process than the UK’s courts have been displaying in recent times. When Sumption was ...”

“... a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage were masked (and painfully complicated) by the emotional ...”

“... and negations in Davie’s art are clearly conditions of their opposite, as a love of country may dictate a refusal to be mindlessly ‘patriotic’. In ‘Middlesex’ Davie tells the story of an English girl met serving beers in a Greek bar: The longer loop their Odysseys, the more Warmly exact the Ithakas they remember: Thus, home she said was ...”

“... expectations. For all that the Labour Party has tried to exploit Remainer discontent with the May government’s push for a clean Brexit, a powerful undertow of Lexiteering persists. The post-2008 crisis of capitalism has delivered a propitious conjuncture: the left’s supplanting of New Labour and its engagement with an electorate that seems willing to ...”

“... from his fellow MPs (which he would have been unable to do), and three days after Theresa May had become prime minister. When I arrived at Broadcasting House for the start of the march, a few hundred people were gathered around a speaker from the UK wing of Black Lives Matter, orating into a megaphone. There were people selling the papers you always ...”

“... slaughtered relatives, destroyed homes, amputation of hands and feet and ears. Millions may still be living with the psychological effects. The UN Human Development Index, which ranks countries by life expectancy, education and standard of living, places Sierra Leone 177th out of 177. Twenty-eight per cent of children die before reaching the age of ...”

“... Julius, once Princess Diana’s divorce lawyer and the courtroom nemesis of the Holocaust denier David Irving, said I hadn’t been invited to carry out an audit. He left before the soup course. Marian told us that Dau’s current backer (earlier, a string of Russian, Ukrainian and West European cultural agencies had put up millions of roubles, hryvnyas and ...”