“... Trump style is “developing-country despot”, rather than European or “evolved American”,’ Peter York wrote in the Times. ‘It doesn’t even try to get things “right” – “real” antiques, architecturally correct detailing or any of that – because, as with DC despots, neither the client nor the people he wants to impress care about ...”

“... her even more than usual. Her father was dying at the time. It wasn’t exactly that men could read her thoughts, but certainly she felt that they were picking up on her vulnerability, seizing their moment to probe an open wound. They were excited by her distress (one target of Weinstein’s advances said he was clearly roused by her fear). The aim of ...”

“... is skin and bones, with only the beautiful second subject offering creaturely warmth. One might read the movement as a study in the juxtaposition of inorganic and organic matter – the second subject and its associated music like plant life clinging to rock. Structurally, the vertical axis is heavily preferred to the horizontal, so that, rather than ...”

“... his hands and cried out: ‘Oh God, oh God.’ The accounts of the Eliots’ married life found in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot or Lyndall Gordon’s or, now, in Carole Seymour-Jones’s book may disagree about the primary cause of the failure of the marriage or the degree of Tom and Vivienne’s responsibility for it, but all of them repeat the same ...”

“... one beside the town hall and a second several blocks west. ‘At about 7.30,’ one of them, Peter Blake, remembered, ‘a roar went through the crowd, emanating from the rear. People turned and looked westwards down the street. I saw, to my amazement, a coach being driven fast straight into the back of the crowd. It was a private coach, an ordinary ...”

“... mostly wind farm or vineyard. At the outer tip of the peninsula, the seventh-century chapel of St-Peter-on-the-Wall, built on the site of a Roman fort, has for company the austere concrete box of a decommissioned power station. The ancient oak trees at Mundon Hall were already beginning to die when Warner first saw them; the trunks still stand in spindly ...”

“... could use the American military to promote its values. The subtitle of The Good Fight (2006) by Peter Beinart, the then editor of the New Republic, insisted ‘Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again’. ‘It’s time to think of torture,’ Newsweek declared a few weeks after 9/11. ‘Focused ...”

“... at Williams’s feet in the early Sixties, there is Terry Eagleton, ‘as allusively charming as Peter Wimsey’; at New Left Review, when it was embarking on its theoretical turn in 1962, the ‘virtuoso eloquence’ of Perry Anderson was backed by Robin Blackburn, ‘a beautiful, big, shock-headed youngster’ who had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... performing in 1815, as his hearing further deteriorated. His work became more difficult, harder to read. But he remained an engaged and worldly businessman, who managed to sell the score of the Missa Solemnis to three different publishers at once (the triple-dating only came to light when two of the publishers met at a trade fair in Leipzig). Moreover, if his ...”

“... 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 ...”