“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... age. This doesn’t occur to Sharpe. His idea of the historian as someone who gets at the facts means that he can give a fine account of the activities of Turpin and the Essex gang, but it makes him quite unfitted to be a reader of Rookwood. His argument is that the real Turpin was (despite ‘Turpin Hero’) rather insignificant; the heroic Turpin is the ...”

“... in which he died on a makeshift altar; the brazenly Christ-like representation of his dead body by David; the renaming of Montmartre (Martyr’s Mount) as Montmarat; the chant of ‘cor de Jésus, cor de Marat’ as members of the Cordelier club carried his heart through the streets of Paris. What did this imitation really amount to? Did it simply express a ...”

“... the BBC when Alan Yentob insisted that an aristocratic ex-Battle of Britain pilot be played by David Jason; ITV loved it, but made similar demands. Eventually, back at the BBC, the play got its perfect casting – Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Joanna Lumley – and was ‘bought’ in 1998 by the then BBC2 controller Mark Thompson for broadcast at ...”

“... will be quoting from her best Brexit speeches fifty years from now, except to mock them (‘Brexit means … we never did find out’). But Churchill wasn’t just a speech-maker. He also made plenty of fateful decisions throughout his long career and it is worth remembering that although May has not reached his heights, nor has she plumbed his depths. As the ...”