“... Common​ sense in British politics tends to be aligned with the wisdom of party managers: that the electorate abhors uncertainty, and is incapable of understanding either internal party divisions or Continental-style coalitions. Only very occasionally, when the whips are thwarted by force of circumstance, do the voters – and indeed a frustrated cadre of pragmatic and independent-minded politicians – escape the iron cage of partisan constraint ...”

“... What does it take​ for a person in 2015 to be the same person as she was in 1995 and will be in 2035? This is the question of personal identity, a question about persistence through time, or ‘diachronic’ identity. It seems enough at first to say that the person is the same in 2015 as in 1995 and in 2035 just so long as she is the same living human animal, the same biological organism (same passport, same national insurance number, same DNA ...”

“... children, dark, hoarded property. The golden stone of its modest neoclassical façade, designed by Robert Edis in 1883, blends into the street front overlooking Green Park. If you had to guess what lay inside you might hazard a hedge fund, or a tax avoidance consultancy, or empty space, left to fatten. Experimental art and its practitioners, surely, left ...”

“... in my local park in Leeds, there is a handsome stone structure. The Barrans Fountain was built by the Victorian clothing manufacturer Sir John Barran, once also the city’s mayor. He must have been a man with ambition. A building he constructed in the city centre is Moorish and beautiful, a small glimpse of Granada in the middle of West Yorkshire, though ...”

“... Modern​ Hollywood isn’t really Hollywood – it’s Calabasas. With everyone now the David O. Selznick of his own social picture, gossip replaced with tweets, and fan magazines with selfies, the grandeur of old Hollywood can seem mythical. Like proper myths, its stories are almost exclusively about metamorphosis, self-destruction and things going wrong, but they are at least stories as opposed to advertisements ...”

“... and British have dispatched troops or bombed from the air. Others have escaped from regimes armed by France and the UK. Afghans appear to be in the majority, but there are also Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Sudanese. The Jungle houses a tiny proportion of the million people who have sought refuge in ...”

“... Now the door is open, and the study has been converted to a playroom, and fathers are expected to be on hand. Even so, inaccessibility remains a dominant motif: the workaholic dad, out early and back late, available only at weekends; the divorced dad, living elsewhere, available only on alternate weekends; the abusive or alcoholic dad, available but not to ...”

“... in a marketplace. The central figure of the book is Meadow Mori, who is introduced to the reader by way of an internet essay, part of a series entitled ‘How I Began’ on a site devoted to Women and Film. After graduating in film studies Mori supposedly wrote to an obese ex-wunderkind of the screen, now reduced to voiceovers and chat show appearances ...”

“... designed to restore Goldsmith’s dignity, did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still ...”

“... abbeys, and whose collections of rusty weaponry, stained glass and old ballads, provided new ways by which the past could be recovered – and also, of course, invented. Some of these antiquaries are familiar to architectural historians, others are known only to a few specialist curators of armour or to historians of ...”

“... mint cakes, asking if he fancied one. Often it is an apparently incidental thing that turns out to be a depth charge. The Dylan soundtrack reveals how much Stoppard is a child of his generation, how much the boy from Eastern Europe belongs to the West, but Lee excavates from it something of more particular interest, pointing out that the word ‘home’ rings ...”

“... than the Jews. The most famous justification for the practice appears in two letters written by Pope Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century to Serenus, bishop of Marseille. Serenus had destroyed some narrative paintings (‘stories’) of ‘holy people’, apparently because they were being worshipped ...”

“... on the cover of this Library of America collection of her stories, plays and other writings is by Carl Van Vechten, and it is one of those images that seems to demonstrate the soul is real, like spirit photography. My study of Carson McCullers began when I was a teenager, as any study of her should. On one of our family outings to the bookstore, I picked ...”

“... for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people racialised as black have been in Britain for more than two thousand years. During the third century, North African Roman soldiers formed part of the occupation of the British Isles: ‘Aurelian Moors’ were ...”

“... man and liberator of the slaves, has been the subject of more than 16,000 books, according to David S. Reynolds’s new biography, Abe. That’s around two a week, on average, since the end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be found in the historical literature, including the moralist who ...”