“... of our race of the 1920s: habit of leisure and at least enough money … freedom to travel and read, to indulge and exhaust curiosities, completely uninhibited talks, resistance to challenge of the right to play, to the idea of growing old, settling down to a steady maturity’. Wilson continues to impress because even at his chattiest and most ...”

“... school of regard. Wharton was best known for a column he wrote in the Telegraph under the name ‘Peter Simple’, and he was pleased to see in Hill’s austere lyricism a salutary rejection of vulgar modern mores, so I am not sure what he would have made of ‘Cute, my arse’ – not to mention, from later sections of the poem, ‘a shot of jism’, ‘a ...”

“... down the red and white Polish border gates, I felt quite protective about frontiers. But then I read a Polish novel. An allegory contrived to lull the censor, it described a tiny sliver of land between Belgium and Germany which had been overlooked by the surveyors as they drew new European frontiers after the fall of Napoleon. In this splinter lived a ...”

“... might back them up. Anyone who thinks the recent antics of the press are uniquely shocking should read this book. Ward’s cottage on the Astor estate was broken into. His friends were bribed to spill the beans, and the ones who wouldn’t talk were harassed. Profumo was pursued remorselessly, along with his wife and eight-year-old son. The police didn’t ...”

“... and then to the Russian cemetery in the distant suburb of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, where Lang read out a message from Mikhail Baryshnikov and ballerinas filled the grave with pointe shoes. Nureyev had ordered that his tomb, an unusual monument covered with a superb mosaic rug, should be placed at a distance from that of Serge Lifar, but it was still ...”

“... in his youth. The partnership has inspired plays and novels, from Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist to Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Dr Dee. Its apotheosis, in this picaresque sense, is the notorious occasion at Trebon Castle in southern Bohemia, when the spirits revealed to Kelley their wish that he and Dee should ‘hold their wives in common’. That Jane Dee ...”

“... down, never mind wind down. Brown harks back to the age when prime ministers had the leisure to read poetry (Disraeli and Gladstone), write love letters (Asquith) or take morning drinks and afternoon naps (Churchill). I imagine there are lawyers, doctors, accountants, even writers, who feel the same sense of nostalgia for a rhythm of life that’s never ...”

“... shape the narrative as that it should try to learn lessons from its period in power. It is wise to read both books with a sceptical eye: for those involved, the temptation to regard one’s past self with the wisdom of hindsight, to burnish one’s choices or disown them, must be overwhelming. (It is commendable that so many of Corbyn’s senior aides chose to ...”

“... Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening ...”

“... her a diamond pendant from Harry Winston.‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’, which he read at the funeral, was Taylor and Burton’s favourite poem. It starts:How to keep – is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keepBack beauty, keep ...”

“... that of Leontes, a world as public as a theatre, we don’t need to look for motives; we need only read behaviour.The play begins (as did Cymbeline) with two courtiers talking. But this careful prosy exchange is so exquisite, so utterly mannered, that one of the two, Archidamus, gets stuck and breaks down – an oddity that may make us more sympathetic when ...”

“... a 43-year-old former flight attendant who charged a line of police with an industrial wheelie bin. Peter Lynch, 61, joined a mob that tried to burn down a hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham; he was carrying a placard condemning the ‘deep state’, the World Health Organisation and Nasa. In Bristol, Ashley Harris, the 36-year-old owner of a scaffolding ...”

“... Yudkowsky clout and access to a wider circle of rich libertarians and tech ultras, notably Peter Thiel. Yudkowsky introduced Thiel to Hassabis; Thiel became a founding investor in DeepMind. Thanks to Thiel, Hassabis then met Elon Musk, who also became a DeepMind backer, before co-founding OpenAI with Altman.Thiel, whose firm Palantir analyses data for ...”

“... by her boss, she changed her story after the US entered the war.) It’s tempting to read Trump’s decision to bomb Iran in psychological terms, something he has encouraged. ‘I may do it,’ he said on 18 June when asked by reporters. ‘I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.’ Perhaps he wanted to avoid any impression ...”

“... rural China. But then he also seems to think it unimaginable that Xi, or anyone else, might have read Rabindranath Tagore or Mikhail Sholokhov (Hemingway is allowed as a possibility). What is clear is that on his tenth application, Xi was accepted as a party member. In 1975, he left the countryside to take a degree in chemical engineering at Tsinghua ...”