“... and there is even a computer game in which you can play at bashing the British at Canton. Wasn’t David Cameron aware of all this when he arrived in Beijing in November 2010 wearing a Remembrance Day poppy in his buttonhole? Or the right-wing press, when it heaped praise on him for allegedly refusing to remove it when the Chinese asked him? That will have ...”

“... which is where you’ll be shopping if you decide to follow your dream of becoming the next David Foster Wallace – who did have to work, incidentally, like the rest of us. (At Pomona College, Foster Wallace’s ‘Prose Fiction’ class consisted entirely of getting students to read mass-market bestsellers.) Why are there no great novelists any ...”

“... obscuring the fact that our existence has ‘no more meaning than the life of a slime mould’. David Brooks, author of the bestselling pop-science Bildungsroman The Social Animal, explains that his fictional everywoman ‘Erica’ is slow to trust ‘Harold’ because ‘while Pleistocene men could pick their mates on the basis of fertility cues ...”

“... philosophers of science, notably Paul Feyerabend, Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault and David Bloor. If Latour’s work has caused particular distress, it is at least in part because of his flagrantly cosmopolitan style: witty, imaginative, literate and unrelentingly ironic. For some, all this spells something manifestly frivolous and naturally ...”

“... out of a difficult life is an idea that some moderns have endorsed. In his ‘Essay on Suicide’, David Hume thought it would be strange for God to deny us an option that even a malaria mosquito could inflict; Georges Poulet disagreeably proclaimed that death by one’s own hand is the only act that avoids the twin perils of a meaningless existence and a ...”

“... book spawned a new genre of British travel-writing, nicely described as ‘motoring pastoral’ by David Matless in Landscape and Englishness (1998). Motoring is imbued with an almost celestial quality in this very British yoking together of nostalgia and modernity, as if the car, for those with the means to own one, had ...”

“... him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is a household name: most publishers remain ...”

“... a stimulus that elicits an automatic response’, he wrote. ‘You become all attention, which means that you become, for the moment, selfless and in a sense entirely identified with the object of your attention … For the cultivated eye, the picture repeats its instantaneous unity like a mouth repeating a single word.’ The genius of ...”

“... suggest that events in Korea in late 1950 brought the US to the brink of nuclear war. Whatever he means when he writes that ‘the knife-edge that Truman had been walking suddenly terminated above an abyss,’ the fact is that the American nuclear arsenal remained in the US under lock and key. Still, Truman was in a fix. He had initially characterised Korea ...”

“... else is bilge’ (the German quark, which has since made its way into English, literally means ‘soft white cheese’). But whatever the conditions in which she found herself – in Warsaw, she was one of 14 political prisoners crammed into a single cell – she never lost her fervour: her joy, as she put it, amid the horrors of the world. ‘My ...”

“... and roadless places, and corruption and incompetence galore. The current conservative senator, David Vitter, has been mixed up with prostitutes while preaching family values; the Democratic congressman from New Orleans had to resign after he was found to have an unexplained $90,000 in his freezer (in an interesting twist, the disarray he created in the ...”

“... a hundred crowns, but not a penny performed . . . Then, after all this, there was by my only means set down unto the Lord Keeper and the Lord of Buckhurst the notablest and vildest articles of atheism that I suppose the like were never known or read of in any age, all which I can show unto you. They were delivered to Her Highness, and command given by ...”

“... an aversion to making decisions, especially difficult decisions involving confrontation – which means nearly all leadership decisions. In the latter half of both books Corbyn is increasingly absent, and his decisions, when he does make them, are Delphic. He sometimes seems irritated by having responsibility for matters that don’t interest him, even ...”

“... prevent legislative paralysis – the so-called gridlock. The persistence of the old party labels means little as of now, and will probably mean even less in the future as four de facto parties continue to develop under two party labels. As for the Clinton Presidency, its failure can be dated very exactly to 26 August 1994, when the last attempt to enact ...”

“... that property was a crime, but sponging and bad landlordship were not. G.M. Trevelyan had a David and Saul relationship of some intensity with his brother Charles, the wenching socialist baronet, who suffered from depression and aristocratic bad temper and wilfulness. If anything could have cured him of progressivism, it would have been the sight of his ...”