“... their surroundings, and tried to come to terms with modernity? ‘This is a political history,’ David Vital’s first sentence states baldly. What interests him most is the legal relationship between Jews and the states they lived in, their evolving civic status, the nature and growth of hostility to them (though not its causes), and the emergence of ...”

“... cultures – because it both ‘assimilates and homogenises’. Two foreign observers of Italy, David Lane, the Economist correspondent in Rome, and Paul Ginsborg, who teaches at Florence University, are now also arguing that fascism has returned to the country. Lane begins his book on the beaches of Lazio in January/February 1944: ‘That winter was among ...”

“... to abandon King’s pacifistic integrationism in favour of militant black nationalist rhetoric.In May 1966, Lewis was initially re-elected as chair of SNCC. But after some members expressed dissatisfaction, another vote was taken in which Carmichael prevailed. This wasn’t altogether unexpected. Carmichael’s faction believed that Lewis was insufficiently ...”

“... genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by ...”

“... with his rival from the radio, Chester Wilmot, Moorehead was an Australian by birth – and he may well have owed some of his success (not least with his employer, Lord Beaverbrook of the Daily Express) to a certain air of breezy informality. But there was also more than a touch of the grand seigneur about him – reflected in his automatic assumption ...”

“... So on what do the claims made for Poussin’s mind ultimately rest? To answer this question it may be worth considering the subject of the painting that inspired Bernini’s remark. Its pendant, the Landscape with the Funeral of Phocion, depicts two slaves bearing the shrouded corpse of the Athenian general away from the city that had sentenced him to ...”

“... pieces of legislation, such as the Berne Convention, do not even venture to define what ‘work’ may be. ‘Literary work’ in copyright law is thus a semantic convenience of the same order as ‘John Doe’: what it is all depends. The legal fiction that the literary work has an abstract, single existence which accompanies but mysteriously transcends any ...”

“... situation, and the need to insist on the absurdity of the absurd. Horror and meaninglessness may be frequent, even banal, but we are lost if we treat them as normal, as all there is: if we abandon our anger at the affront they offer to reason. If our normality helps us to struggle, our rage may help us to survive. But ...”

“... parakeets, which are spreading rapidly in London (a large colony at Sunbury apparently) and may one day oust the pigeons. Yorkshire, 29 March. The conductor on the GNER train to Leeds is now styled Customer Operations Leader and announces himself as such, though (and it’s to his credit) he stumbles several times when he has to broadcast this ...”

“... Andy Seaman​ felt out of place when, on 26 May 2022, he walked into the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith. Andy has little connection to Ireland; he’s from East London and his family’s roots are in Dominica. But earlier that day he had heard on the radio that the centre was hosting an event run by the organisation Troubles, Tragedy and Trauma ...”

“... involvement in Britain’s 5G network, and the bombardiers of Brexit – Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis, Liam Fox et al – are furious too. The industry points out that Huawei kit has already been installed in dozens of cities across the UK and to a more sophisticated standard than the US can currently provide. Ripping it all out would cost billions ...”

“... Duchesse de Guermantes and finds her going to a party. He blurts out that he is mortally ill and may not be seeing her again. She ignores this news and gives him a smiling farewell as she gets into her carriage. E.M. Forster thought the scene one of the most odious in the novel, or rather in the Novel, and he seems to assume, rather naively, that Proust is ...”

“... for a late and largely undetected Labour surge in the run-up to the 2017 general election, Theresa May might now be steering us through the Covid-19 crisis: trusted, sensible and reliable, however costively unimaginative and incapable of the nimble feats of very un-Conservative gymnastics so far performed by Boris Johnson’s chancellor, Rishi Sunak. And ...”

“... that provide clues and proceed, with varying degrees of caution, to do some invention. The story may then become so complicated that even reasonably sober academic biographers have to alter the whole shape of the early career to accommodate their guesses. When the fiction is provided by someone whose business is precisely the writing of fiction the invention ...”

“... make guesses about the causes of burps, rumbles, farts, sweats, swellings, flushes and rashes. We may even get a glance, by way of a nasty accident, at a bit of bone. But in other ways we know our insides hardly at all. We are vague about what they look like. Even when we have the words – spleen, kidney and so forth – the associated pictures are often ...”