“... Inevitably,​ the first thing I did when I got my copy of the one-volume edition of The Benn Diaries (Hutchinson, £30) was to look up Jeremy Corbyn in the index. He appears about as often as you’d expect, 15 times in total, scattered at regular intervals across 24 years, from 1983 until 2007. (The diaries end in 2009, five years before Benn’s death ...”

“... Hitchens was right to go West. He needed lusher plains of political corruption across which to spread himself. He needed a country of wide horizons and myopic international vision. And he needed an administration of almost limitless power and quite exceptional stupidity. Then he could be happy, indulging in the lethal, jugulating kind of journalism at which he excels ...”

“... Philosophy’s critics have a variety of criteria from which to choose. The first question to ask about any philosopher’s claims is whether they are true. But there are other questions which sometimes crowd this one out. Is his work accessible and persuasive? Does it touch our lives? Will it last? With so many options there is no pretending that it is obvious what counts as success ...”

“... Watching​ Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on 4 February, I felt that we had crossed a line. This president was setting up as the benevolent ruler of – it wasn’t clear what. Not a constitutional democracy. A different kind of country. He had brought along, as guests, individuals who were given honourable mentions in his speech, people who looked up in gratitude as he scattered his gifts ...”

“... Lucy​ and I had been through the whole of Babylon Berlin – or so we thought – all sixteen episodes, swallowing three a night. We were bingeing, and greedy for more just to get away from that other consuming and insoluble show, playing on MSNBC night after night, where Rachel Maddow and the others were trying to persuade us that it was all beginning to be over, the Trump thing, that it would all be over very soon, because of the investigation, the Mueller thing ...”

“... At the end of May, Frank Schirrmacher, an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, declared in an open letter that he had refused to serialise Martin Walser’s novel Tod eines Kritikers, or ‘Death of a Critic’, on the grounds that it was a ‘document of hatred’, a fantasy ‘execution’ of the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki. In Walser’s book a novelist called Hans Lach is under arrest on suspicion of murdering André Ehrl-König, critic and host of a TV book programme, who had excoriated Lach’s work on his show ...”

“... Michel Foucault has of late become something of a cult figure in the Anglo-Saxon world. His critics can point out that he has the necessary qualifications for guru status, in that his writings have tended to be cross-disciplinary, obscure and fairly opaque. Yet his work has recently taken on a new clarity and, moreover, he has acknowledged that in his previous studies he had missed an important explanatory variable – namely, ‘power ...”

“... Two exhibitions, one in London, the other in Grasmere, might have been framed to show how thinking and feeling have changed since the ‘death of God’ early last century. The landscape painters in American Sublime (at Tate Britain until 19 May) believed, as most people did, that the Earth was God’s creation and that its bones, its visible crust, were ‘a Book of Revelations in the rock-leaved Bible of geology ...”

“... in a chapter that compares Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story ‘The Bottle Imp’ (1891) with David Robert Mitchell’s zombie film It Follows (2014). The former was published a year after the sovereign debt crisis brought about by the insolvency of Barings Bank, the latter conceived in the aftermath of the 2008 subprime debacle. Both concern ‘gimmicks ...”

“... in novels dedicated to the ‘strange operations of memory’, including Great Expectations and David Copperfield. Mullan writes very well about those moments in the books when smell reveals the ‘presentness of what is lost’. But there are many more moments to be found in which the presentness revealed is very definitely that of the present rather than ...”

“... doorstopper – the ‘encyclopedic’ novel – which includes such celebrated behemoths as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) and Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997). Although mustering a meagre 482 pages to their 1079 and 827, The Last Samurai is vauntingly expansive in both form and ambition. As a subgenre, the encyclopedic novel develops ...”

“... the mood took him, an advocate of cool. In Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude, Dick Pountain and David Robins define cool as a ‘new secular virtue’ – the official language of a private or subcultural rebelliousness retuned from generation to generation, as well as of worldwide commodity fetishism. According to Alan Liu, in The Laws of Cool, it’s a ...”

“... On​ 21 April 2002 Jean-Marie Le Pen became the first leader of a far-right party to reach the run-off of a French presidential election. France was astonished. For two weeks, daily anti-fascist demonstrations took place in cities and the mainstream media called on voters to re-elect the conservative Jacques Chirac. But the upsetting result proved a false alarm ...”

“... Wellington (her pen as mighty as his sword); Gash’s Peel (a peerless study of a baronet); Lord David Cecil’s Melbourne (one patrician beguilingly evoking another); Blake’s Disraeli (champagne and epigrams all the way); and Marquand’s MacDonald (Fame is the spur stood on its head). But many prime ministers have fared less well: Chatham and Lord John ...”

“... The idea of a co-ordinated attack by five Arab armies – Goliath and his hordes against little David – is fatuous. When Israel attacked Egyptian forces in September 1948, Abdullah hoped the Egyptians would lose: he believed that an Israeli victory would prevent the Arabs from challenging his right to the West Bank. In the weeks preceding the ...”