“... Bruce Page’s recent work, The Murdoch Archipelago, is as badly written as any book I have ever read, and is full of sentences which don’t mean quite what their author seems to think they do, but it does have a body of reflection and inside experience to make its bitter critique of Murdoch convincingly feelingful. Perhaps the most useful book is Neil ...”

“... about politics. It’s interesting in this context to look at two figures who grew up and began to read and think for themselves in an Ireland freed from the energy that Parnell absorbed, a time when Ireland was more open to darting shifts and suggestions. Both Patrick Pearse and James Joyce had fathers who believed passionately in what Parnell had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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, 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... right’s swivel-eyed homophobia. A surprising number of gay men top the Trumpist pyramid (Peter Thiel, for instance, or the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent) and others lurk on its digital outskirts, but O’Neill isn’t one of them. He obviously didn’t believe his statements undermined his heterosexuality. Presumably this would be a risk only if ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”