“... on bail are being given court dates in 2029. Victims and defendants are in limbo: the guilty ones may well think they’ve got away with it. Witnesses’ memories fade; some are no longer willing to engage with the process. It is an intolerable state of affairs. The number of defendants remanded in custody pending trial almost doubled between 2018 and ...”

“... he is up to. We know that as a young man he moved to Moscow because he was a Communist. But he may have been involved there in something more sinister than tailoring; he may be mad; he may have intended to murder the fashion magnate and fled from a bad conscience. Two American couples ...”

“... Those who have visited the House of Lords as tourists may remember a notice entreating them not to sit on the Woolsack. Nobody at all will remember a light novel of thirty years ago in which the hero, detained in the Palace of Westminster for contempt of Parliament, was found on the Woolsack passionately entwined with his girlfriend ...”

“... even outdo the Bible, which was of course written by divers hands, over a 1500-year period, and may have been assisted in its composition by the Spirit of God Him or Herself. ‘I have now devoted over 25 years of my life,’ Hillier announces in his preface, ‘to the 78 of John Betjeman’s.’ One begins to suspect that Hillier does not in fact ...”

“... zero tolerance or homeland security, Ferguson’s description of the American way of condemnation may offer some useful pointers to this country’s future. When it comes to the ‘war on terror’, however, Ferguson is reticent. The subject is given less than a page, and though he allows that prosecuting terrorists is important, he makes the puzzling claim ...”

“... new levels of celebrity on the right aren’t lost – they are found.’ Wolf, as Klein says, may well still think Bannon is ‘the devil’, in which case she may be some sort of Faust. ‘She is getting everything she once had and lost – attention, respect, money, power. Just through a warped mirror.’‘Thank you ...”

“... would be more familiar with snakes than electric cables, but the simile, back-to-front though it may be, works because it shows he considers himself in unknown and potentially dangerous territory. It’s there for our benefit, not Randeep’s. Because Sahota doesn’t explain everything straightaway, or translate the Punjabi phrases he uses, or spell out the ...”

“... the English are more negative than seems justified by the people and situations he describes, and may have been added or amplified after the disappointing outcome of his mission. He frequently echoes the remark that Napoleon is reputed to have made about the English being a nation of shopkeepers, a characteristic that must have been especially annoying to ...”

“... protected from discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity. (Liberals may find Gorsuch’s approach to law less appealing when the court is faced with affirmative action cases.) But no one doubts that Gorsuch is on the right wing of the Republican Party, and there are no signs of his moving to the left. A court governed by ...”

“... clubs and construct mad legends about the golden years when they were in charge. Such fairy-tales may be comforting to those who weave them. But the rest of us should not believe them. Oddly enough, the Conservative Party is by no means unique in possessing a highly misleading mythology about its past. The Liberal Party, as was, had its share of ...”

“... two and three if you find yourself in difficulties.’ This tutorial tone, kept up throughout, may make some readers feel that he underestimates them. Certainly one keeps expecting to come upon the sort of informative illustrations that this theme, when popularised, conventionally needs: they would depict, say, a detail from Holman Hunt’s The Finding of ...”

“... any Scots from the indictment (though – unkindest cut – he does exonerate one Welshman, David Jones). Worse still for Crawford, Kenner announces, ‘There’s no longer an English literature’: by which he means that, whereas ‘talent has not been lacking’ – on the contrary, ‘good poets are dispersed round the land’ and each has a personal ...”

“... believe that it has a more sinister implication than Professor Hough would allow. The 13th Cycle may be the realm of an ultimate freedom. It may be the realm into which the Cuchulainn of the plays would pass were he to offer his history as legend to the world. It may be the God that is ...”

“... others was his apparent failure to recognise Scott’s antagonism towards him. This antagonism may have been rooted in the fact that Gran was Norwegian. Before Amundsen announced his intention to sail south, Gran’s being Norwegian was little problem, but after Amundsen’s famous, brutally terse telegram reached Scott in Melbourne, it was a different ...”

“... practical jokes. But he was fearless, and an inspired mechanic. When he took off at dawn on 20 May 1927 for his historic flight across the Atlantic, the runway at Roosevelt Field, New York, was sodden; The Spirit of St Louis was carrying a thousand pounds more weight than ever before, and its engine was not generating full power because of the ...”