“... I don’t remember when I was first irritated by that children’s rhyme, which is wrong twice over. Oil painting may well be hard but in some ways it’s easier than painting in watercolour, and watercolours are often more beautiful. However, the prejudice the rhyme encapsulates does arise from real differences ...”

“... the raciest of spy stories, presenting a sexed-up version of the 55-page charge sheet released by the FBI – the only actual information anyone really has – as the latest word in investigative journalism. Still, the FBI document spoke for itself: the spies moaned about not being able to get their super- secret laptops to work; two of them complained ...”

“... Of all the many tributes to Michael Foot it was David Cameron who hit the nail on the head. He was, Cameron said, ‘almost the last link to a more heroic age in politics’. In appearance, and demeanour, Foot resembled an Old Testament prophet. An impression which, in later life, his shock of white hair, the passion of his delivery and the magnificence of his rhetoric served only to enhance ...”

“... and 2013, he provided the Obama administration with the legal basis for assassination carried out by drones. And despite having written academic papers backing a powerful and restrictive War Powers Act, he made the legal case for the Obama administration’s right to make war on Libya without bothering to get congressional approval. Koh, who has now returned ...”

“... materialise. From John Aubrey’s passing remark in 1665 that Stonehenge might have been built by druids, through William Stukeley’s obsessively detailed and almost entirely invented account of the druidic religion it took another hundred and fifty years, but in the early 20th century druids appeared at Stonehenge and they have been there ever since. It ...”

“... Independent Labour Party MP, socialist, orator, Scotsman and the subject of a biography written by Gordon Brown twenty years ago – was not a successful leader, although some of his contemporaries in the 1920s thought he might become one. ‘Maxton was never a government minister,’ Brown wrote of his subject, ‘and his failure to achieve any high office ...”

“... car, lights on, is parked behind him. Beyond the car the black-green of a band of trees is broken by a few bright spots; they could be streetlights or house lights half-obscured by foliage. It must be night time. Are they crime-scene floodlights that ...”

“... invitation to the underground government facility newly photographed in large-format full colour by David Moore. The Last Things (Dewi Lewis, £25) opens with an anonymous quote – ‘Ministry of Defence official, London 2007’ – that reads: ‘I don’t understand how you’ve got this far.’ What follows is a series of shots of unpeopled hallways ...”

“... Household, whose tedious task it now is to ascertain the manner of Diana’s death. Entirely by coincidence, Burgess will also preside over the inquest into the death of Dodi Fayed, because Fayed is buried on the family estate at Oxted, in Surrey, and Burgess is the Surrey Coroner as well as the Coroner of the Queen’s Household. It’s not his job to ...”

“... Or you could – virtually speaking – sit in a quiet corner by yourself and read the newspaper. The possibilities are endless. The web browser as we know it, with hyperlinks you can follow simply by clicking on them, drop-down menus, scroll bars and – crucially – pictures, was ...”

“... fortune through some startling and, on occasion, clandestine publishing and movie contracts, as David Reynolds has shown in his riveting In Command of History. Then there is self-justification after retirement, which almost always produces memoirs of numbing boredom: I assume – or hope – that no one alive has actually read every page of all the volumes ...”

“... media, though particularly the BBC, expressing the view that ‘journalism in this country could be one of the causes of social malaise because of its aggression towards those in power in civil society.’ Many of Lloyd’s criticisms of the BBC are hard to disagree with – a wearisome focus on personality and celebrity, a deficit of serious current affairs ...”

“... Global warming has got scary, industrialised agriculture makes me angry and I’m delighted to be living in a green moment, with Labour and the Tories both desperate to appear the more eco-friendly party. On the other hand, the craze for ethical living relies rather heavily on its own kind of consumerism and being green can seem merely a question of where ...”

“... from the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1874 aged 65, but was leader and prime minister again by 1880, and quit his fourth premiership on a point of principle in 1894 aged 84, impatient, indignant, and half-blinded by a ginger biscuit thrown at him by an angry woman during a rally in ...”

“... Exactly 146 interviews later, John le Carré, our premier narrative spook-meister, exhibits, by his own admission, that knack whereby the memory fails and the lie takes over. There is something in his tone that advises us not to believe him too much. The interview took place in 1997, more than thirty years after he left MI6, but he admits to ‘a ...”