“... I am reliably informed, for instance, that practising Polish Catholics resort to abortion as a means of birth control on a large scale. The state, though officially in favour of contraception, does not ensure the availability of contraceptives – the pill is particularly difficult to obtain – but does provide abortion on demand. It is possible that this ...”

“... as they take what they are doing seriously. This doesn’t mean they can’t be funny; it just means they have to be serious about what’s funny on the radio. Moyles puts it like this: I FUCKING LOVE GREAT RADIO! I really do. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t love all radio. But it’s fair to say that when it’s done properly I love it … Now let me tell ...”

“... Latin America to the Ottoman Empire to China, in which Europe and the US interfered – whether by means of force or intrusive economic ‘meddling’ – to promote their own interests. Sometimes this involved coercion of the reluctant and uncooperative: Britain fought the two Opium Wars in part to compel China to participate in ‘free trade’. As Western ...”

“... been reading Arnold Bennett, the prolific Edwardian chronicler of lives in gradual but by no means uneventful decline: ‘declension’, Bennett called it, with a nod to the term’s grammatical sense, as though to indicate that steady failure can serve as well as spectacular reversals of fortune to bring out the variation in the forms a life might ...”

“... that the system would do everything in its power to soften the blow of their choice. It also means that if Trump poses a serious threat to American democracy, we lack the language to express it. However, the real perils of crying wolf lie on the other side. Trump said that America was a broken society and that he was coming to fix it. But it isn’t ...”

“... corrections – once considered the epitome of progressive sanctions – were reinterpreted as means whereby the normalising gaze of the authorities could be extended into the homes of deviants and non-deviants alike, while the reformers’ ideal of a rehabilitative prison was depicted as an Orwellian nightmare of surveillance, discipline and ...”

“... a widely recognised public figure. Immobile for decades, he is now unable to communicate except by means of an electronic voice-synthesiser connected to a word-processor. He suffers from what is variously known as motor neurone disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, but despite his confinement has moved into the vanguard of ...”

“... has stayed dead. The GDR was never, as some liked to believe, the continuation of Prussia by other means. Junker estates were broken up, and Prussia was distributed among the Poles and Russians as well as the Germans. Recent events are unlikely to change any of that. Restitution of property almost certainly does not apply to the former estates, and the ...”

“... contingencies’, able to call for new elections in moments of ‘confusion’ and with the means to act as ‘guarantor of national independence’ in cases of emergency. Instead, the founders of the Fourth Republic (1946-58) established a parliamentary regime with a weak presidency. The regime proved unstable, with 24 prime ministers in a dozen ...”

“... British foreign policy today is ineluctably shaped by Britain’s economic decline. This not only means that the day-to-day stuff of foreign policy consists of arguments about agricultural prices and fishing quotas, but also that the primacy of foreign policy has given place to the primacy of domestic policy, not in the sense that foreign policy is ...”

“... destroy them as a political force in the process. Up went tuition fees, and out went Nick Clegg. David Cameron was the salesman, Clegg was the punch-bag, but Osborne was the one pulling the strings. Whenever he became the focus of attention, as he did after his ‘omnishambles’ budget in 2012, his lack of presentational skills came close to being his ...”

“... Lennon associated with ‘all those bloody musicians and their GCEs’. In a 1982 interview with David Scheff, he insists again that although rock and roll first came into his consciousness through white singers like Bill Hayley, Elvis Presley and the most marked white influence on the Beatles, Buddy Holly, it was the original black music which ‘changed ...”

“... Actors don’t lodge in the culture as once they did,’ David Thomson writes in the entry on Heath Ledger in the latest edition of his Biographical Dictionary of Film. ‘They are a type of celebrity now.’ He contrasts Ledger, who died three years ago at the age of 28, with James Dean, who died 55 years ago at the age of 24 and became the standard against which all young, handsome, would-be acting geniuses in Hollywood are measured ...”

“... which can be seen as a sort of compressed version of Guernica – whose dual models in Poussin and David are not painterly in style. Having gone further here than ever before into the post-Renaissance tradition, Picasso soon turned his back on it to work, more characteristically, in a pre-Giottesque tradition. If his painting of the period preceding his late ...”

“... political programme of ruthless power-seekers: ‘persecution over-reached itself, so that from a means it became an end.’ ‘Torrents of hate’ were unleashed which moulded the later history of both Germany and Spain. In his earlier books on the Marranos Netanyahu insisted that the solution would have been massive migration to the Holy Land, but that even ...”