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“... flow.The problem is compounded by the often contrasting forms of competence in play. One writer may be an accomplished biographer, but without any real expertise in the field in which their current subject worked. Another may be a fellow specialist working on the same material and issues as their subject, but lacking any ...”

“... doesn’t want to know any more, and nature proceeds to peel you open. The truth, when we find it, may turn out to be less ‘moral’, less totalitarian. Meanwhile, however, that is what it looks like. Judging by the faces and voices of the victims, that is what it feels like too. Aids starts in the 1970s. Here’s Edmund White, describing the San Francisco ...”

“... the Church against the Lutheran threat, which Wolsey took very seriously (and which the reader may suspect to have owed some of its following to anti-clericalism). If Wolsey’s plans for reforms were limited, it was because fundamental change was unnecessary. If they were not fully implemented, it was because he prudently avoided confrontation. He was ...”

“... be a misrepresentation. Depending on which deconstructionist text one reads, deconstruction may be seen as a philosophical system, a critique of systems, an analysis of the conditions of system-making, a method, a critique of method, a mode of reading, a mode of literature in its own right, or as all or none of these things. Nor are the consequences of ...”

“... signify self-possession, and then use that knowledge, together with any other assumptions we may make about the man and about the circumstances of this particular gesture, as a basis for inferring what he means by it. Bremmer and Roodenburg’s contributors assume that communication is complete once signal has been decoded into message. In fact, it has ...”

“... each slot goes on behind the scenes to determine which ad you will be shown. Your phone or laptop may itself be gathering bids for the auction. Sometimes, an enigmatic pattern or grey rectangle will appear instead of an ad.What goes on during those few seconds is vital to the economics of journalism and is the subject of sharp, subterranean conflict among ...”

“... even when they get things right, giving attentive accounts with the salient facts in order, they may leave out friendships and discoveries that contributed greatly to a writer’s inner life. How to supplement – or correct, or displace – a future biography without taking years to concentrate on a memoir? Seamus Heaney and Dennis O’Driscoll have found a ...”

“... we encounter Adam Smith and David Ricardo and the slightly more contemporary figure of Theresa May, whose ambition to make Britain ‘the global leader in free trade’ Hannan quotes approvingly. Free trade is the great elixir. ‘Free trade doesn’t simply put more money into the hands of the lowest earners. It doesn’t just eliminate extreme poverty ...”

“... in the highlands of Papua New Guinea is one of the poorest and most lawless places on earth. On 18 May 2015 ten men armed with machetes, axes and homemade guns entered the village of Fiyawena looking for a woman called Mifila, the mother of two young children. Six months earlier she and three other women had been accused of using witchcraft to cause a measles ...”

“... are sliding down the league tables of national wealth, income, longevity and productivity. This may reveal only our low expectations – but it may do something to explain why the public is so hard to arouse in the cause of political and administrative efficiency, and why it’s myopic to lash out at Whitehall rather than ...”

“... over-treatment in the US, while fund-holding and drug budgets are feared here because they may encourage under-treatment). Both parties also believe that the recent NHS reforms are of quite momentous significance. A foreign observer might at first be puzzled, since the reforms appear to consist mostly of accounting changes, and will still leave the UK ...”

“... two nations were fighting to decide to which of them ‘the empire of the seas shall belong’, may have overestimated the confidence of both sides, but the even-handedness of his judgment is more persuasive than the English posture of righteous defensiveness. Here as elsewhere Pincus’s decision to base so much of his account of Dutch politics on English ...”

“... The English are not at their best, although they may well be at their most characteristic, when they go on a lot about the dear old days at school or the ’varsity. Not even the inspired Cyril Connolly could get his tongue far enough into his cheek to be anything more tolerable than stomach-turning about Eton. George Orwell, who had been there too but thought it was possible to have a life afterwards, was surely right to tell him to come off it ...”

“... exhilaration was felt in Britain. Australians who had felt themselves to be in exile here, such as Richard Neville, the editor of Oz, hurried home to help with the crusade. Germaine Greer briefly ceased to knock her own country. Almost anything seemed possible. In three years, the dream collapsed, in circumstances that had a lasting effect. On 11 November 1975 ...”

“... the work seriously. Syberberg eschews a naturalistic or documentary style of presentation. There may be more hard facts than soft focuses in the film, but the facts are woven into images from which they are inseparable. They would not be much help in passing an exam in history or civics. In a work as full of conceit as it is of conceits, Syberberg shows an ...”