“... a blazing log fire in the synthetic chill. Extreme as Nixon’s virtuoso double-polluting habits may seem now, he was more in tune with the American public mood on matters of temperature control than the only President who tried to rein in his nation’s growing addiction to air-conditioning, Jimmy Carter. In 1979, in the wake of the leap in oil ...”

“... of how to live. No way of life is objectively superior or privileged. To claim otherwise may seem arrogant, narrow-minded or intolerant. Now this train of thought, although seductive, is nevertheless confused. For when it is taken as a recommendation of subjectivism that it constitutes a humane and tolerant response to pluralism, humanity and ...”

“... project between 1942 and 1945: Berti, or Engelbert Egon August Ernst Broda, and Alan Nunn May, who was sentenced to ten years for it. Broda, who probably had the longer record of relations with Moscow, was never tried though seen as heavily suspect by the British security services. As it happens, I knew or met all three as well as a very large ...”

“... of the Rosetta Stone. The number of them hints at a BM merchandising frenzy: for sale, and I may have miscounted, are a mug, a mouse-mat, a ceramic tile, a tie, a teacloth, a scarf, a T-shirt and two sizes of replica, all of them stamped with a presumably random excerpt from the Stone’s inscriptions. It’s long been the received wisdom locally that ...”

“... Korea and, briefly, apartheid South Africa, have unofficially joined the club. Now Iran, too, may be trying to develop the bomb, and has threatened to withdraw from the treaty, as North Korea did in 2003. Iran’s determination to acquire the capability to enrich uranium and process spent reactor fuel in order to obtain plutonium is beyond doubt. This ...”

“... reports for subsequent elections as a morality tale with strongly Blairite undercurrents. In May 1979, when Thatcher first won, polling day was ‘cold with wintry showers, especially in the north’. It was a little better in June 1983, with ‘a few showers as a trough moved through’, and again in June 1987, which was ‘showery at times’. By April ...”

“... we are all about to be nuked, and the next, we go back to arguing about Jeremy Corbyn. Theresa May’s surprise announcement of a snap election – surprising only because she’d spent the last nine months telling us it wasn’t going to happen – immediately wiped North Korea from the headlines, and returned the spotlight to another, more drawn-out ...”

“... households – households containing more than one pair of parents and their children – may exist for only a few years altogether in a society where the complex household is a norm. But as that book showed, the family life of Western Europe has been determined by what has come to be called the ‘Hajnal’ pattern of marriage. Marriage, J. Hajnal ...”

“... shedding karma, confessing, studying for the fasting death. He avoids quarrels and politics, may not repair three unmended garments, nuns four, has rayaharana, the hand broom of wool or grass, to clear living things from his path, a cloth to wipe animate dust from his face and to prevent such beings entering mouth or nose. He takes care not to walk too ...”

“... patronage of a king proclaim a writer at ease with his own educational capital and the position it may earn him. As it turned out, Love’s Labour’s Lost was a landmark in Shakespeare’s accession to prosperity and prestige. It appears to have been the first of his plays to be acted before Queen Elizabeth, and it was later revived for James after ...”

“... only the description of the dog is given as a quotation (I’m not quite sure why; I suppose there may be spaniels who don’t look lugubrious). However, when I pursued the incident to its source in the published version of Spender’s journals, I found none of the detail of the earlier accident, merely a mention that the car-door incident ‘brought to mind ...”

“... more directly to a system-inherent failure. An economic system that cannot deliver the goods may for a variety of reasons fail to ensure compliance with the law. In particular, firms that do not get the supplies they need to fulfil their quota have to resort to bribery. The Sao Paulo episode shows a society which is locked into an inferior ...”

“... Thatcher, Cameron will ultimately be judged and defined by what he does.’ A journalist who may be closer to events, Peter Snowdon ends his book on a more equivocal note: ‘If the last four and a half years have been testing for Cameron’s Conservative Party,’ he writes, ‘the next few will be far harder, whether the party wins or loses.’ Not ...”

“... against doctors. Relief at the avoidance of a harsh injustice is appropriate. But the wider hopes may be unfounded. Members of LIFE have expressed the intention to continue as before. And the legal position may be less secure than doctors would wish. Even if the verdict, with no appeal to a higher court, could be taken as ...”

“... projects, if only retrospectively. Either way the news is good, even when it’s very bad. (It may not be Christianity or atheism that makes tragic drama impossible, but chaos theory.) So Oedipus’ ultimate self-recognition is numinous and reassuring. Whereas, at the end of Lear, Nuttall suggests, Shakespeare ‘offers no such clinching final ...”