“... corporate executives were under mounting pressure to keep stock prices high by any means necessary, in order to maintain access to cheap finance and the investment funds required to compete; the fact that they had come to depend heavily on stock options for their own compensation naturally quickened the temptation. One after another great ...”

“... not the aspect of Proust that appealed to Forster. Rickie, in The Longest Journey, is a writer, or means to be, but he’s not writing The Longest Journey. Forster notes that Proust ‘takes any and every way, moves backwards and forwards as he likes, led not by the story but by the psychological movement behind it’. Admirable, but not really for him. He ...”

“... intellectual and emotional energy, when he left Ireland and pursued a career in England. As David Bromwich has already pointed out, there is an English Burke whom O’Brien never makes known to his readers. He understands, and can excitingly depict, the oratory and politics of Burke’s House of Commons; but since he is intent on arguing that the ghosts ...”

“... world-view, but for it even to be a starter in this role, one would have to figure out what it means. For, as the philosopher Stanley Cavell observed, the meaning(s) will vary according to the stress-pattern the actor’s voice imposes on its principal terms; if, for example, on ‘cure’, this of itself would not preclude other worthwhile possibilities ...”

“... Left, ‘had the novelist’s gift of telling lies’, and it seems that Roth had it too. Until David Bronsen established the facts in his German-language biography (an English translation is in progress), the record of Roth’s life was an evocative smudge, a rumour worthy of the shadowy border town in which he was born – a town about which, in different ...”

“... employment. Aimed primarily at Asia and Central/Eastern Europe, the scheme was commended by David Blunkett as proof that the Government was ‘delivering nothing less than one of the world’s most flexible modern work permit systems. To maintain a buoyant economy we need to ensure employers can quickly fill key posts where shortages exist.’ This ...”

“... into the 1960s, Jenkins declared that the aim of politics should be ‘to use prosperity as a means to a more civilised and tolerant community’, which led him to this revealing statement of belief: ‘One of the central purposes of democratic socialism is to extend throughout the community the freedom of choice which was previously the prerogative of ...”

“... a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot ...”

“... diplomats have all called on Thein Sein. Each has returned cautious, but unmistakably impressed. David Cameron, who this week became the most important visitor so far, urged us all to ‘pay tribute … to the leadership of President Thein Sein and his government, which has been prepared to release political prisoners, hold by-elections and legalise ...”

“... medicines, but that it is true. Johnson’s ecclesiastical cynicism – where ‘strength’ means only ‘strength for the Church’ – suspends what is most powerful about Christianity: its claim to be true. Instead he offers the milder language of success: does it work for you? To defend religion’s success is not to defend it. It is to undermine ...”

“... carrying out the tests on Josephine he and I chatted about the great days of Charlie Cooke, David Webb and Peter Osgood. He told me it was already too late to try AZT and 3TC on Josephine but he was cautiously hopeful. ‘To get Aids there has to be mixing of blood, which means there has to be a break in the skin or ...”

“... someone else back and that’s what neither of them was good at.28 March. Another death, this time David Storey whom I liked and found sympathetic, though I might run into him only occasionally and most often in M&S. It was always cheering, even if these days he was often shuffling as much from the medicines he was taking as from old age. But he would call me ...”

“... a ‘steady drip’ of information which, through sustained concentration, we can transfer by means of this thimble with little spillage. But on the web, Carr writes, ‘we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from one faucet to the next,’ and what we end up with is ‘a jumble of drops from ...”

“... like the Israeli government, calls for calm and a return to the status quo, which in practice means the site’s continued control by Israel. As steadily increasing numbers of Israel’s Jewish citizens gain access the al-Aqsa compound, a site also revered by Jews as the Temple Mount, Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem continue to be forbidden from ...”

“... the efforts of kindly Tommies in winning hearts and minds. Recent studies – for instance, David French’s excellent The British Way in Counter-Insurgency 1945-67 – show that in Malaya, Cyprus, Aden and Kenya British soldiers in fact displayed frequent brutality, often condoned by their officers. In all of Britain’s counterinsurgency ...”