“... Natalie Rolls, also a Blyth councillor, didn’t return my calls. The town’s Reform mayor, David Swinhoe, was also shy. Nor could I reach the most prominent Reform councillor from Blyth, Barry Elliott, the Trump-like figure who came second to Ronnie Campbell in 2015 and who beat Deirdre Campbell in this year’s county council elections. Elliott is a ...”

“... large oil reserves. Or the insistence on acquiring Greenland, even – or especially – if it means tearing up the rules-based order established after the war. Or the creation of a ‘Board of Peace’ in Gaza, designed to replace the United Nations – the list goes on.Donald Trump’s presidency is many things, but it is, above all, a violent attempt to ...”

“... the bearer on demand the sum of ten pounds’. When we parse it, it’s not clear what it means. Ten pounds of what? We’ve already got ten pounds. That’s exactly what we’re holding in our hand. It doesn’t mean, pay the bearer on demand ten pounds’ worth of gold: the link between currency and gold was ended in 1971, and anyway, Gordon Brown ...”

“... Observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope. I insist on spending this time to the best advantage. I will go down with my colours flying. This I see verges on introspection, but doesn’t quite fall in. Suppose, I bought a ticket at the museum; biked in daily, and ...”

“... be described if YouTube were owned by a print media company. The internet is the most effective means of giving stuff away for free that humanity has ever devised. Actually making money from it is not just hard, it may be fundamentally opposed to the character and momentum of the net. And yet this is where the newspaper business now is. Its underlying ...”

“... Hopkins; and though Steegmuller did write some fiction – including mysteries under the name of David Keith – it’s a fair bet that Davis is the best fiction writer ever to translate the novel. Which suggests a further question to the opening list: would you rather have your great novel translated by a good writer or a less good one? This is not as idle ...”

“... African countries – the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda – and to drop me off in Kigali. Though it means they have to give up a seat for a reporter covering their entente cordiale, they agree. For the Rwandan authorities, it is tricky to deny me a visa as part of a Franco-British delegation. Védrine is the first French minister to visit Kigali after the ...”

“... know my hour is come’ – and the empire has won. There’s no reason to suppose that Antony means what he says when he calls Brutus ‘the noblest Roman’: speaking over Caesar’s corpse two acts earlier, he does an impressive job of burying Brutus in popular opinion while pretending to praise him, steadily twisting the word ‘honourable’ into a ...”

“... Boeing X-37 robotic spacecraft. When asked about this, the second in command of the space force, David Thompson, said: ‘We don’t need to tell the world everything we’re doing.’ The US hasn’t yet made what aerospace analysts call the transition from ‘space operators to space warfighters’. But the vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of ...”

“... So there’s no defending it. On the other hand, you’ve got to be honest about what it means to lead a country. It means killing people.’*Two major hotel chains announce they will not allow ICE to hold arrested families in their properties, as ICE had planned. Marriott International says: ‘Our hotels are not ...”

“... in the West, driven underground by the shocking revelations of the Final Solution. Though by no means dead, the old animosities against the Jews were fast subsiding before fresh demarcations (against Blacks, Asians, Chicanos, Turks and other Mediterranean peoples, contemporary analogues of the Ostjuden), while the ‘ghetto’ (a psycho-cultural more than a ...”

“... Emily Brontë poems. Fred was even worse: in 1913 he wrote three novels in eight months – David Blaize, The Freaks of Mayfair and Mike. In the last three years of his life he managed eight books. Of his ‘masterpiece’ As We Were (1932), his modern biographer observes deadpan: ‘Significantly, the manuscript demonstrates that Fred took greater care ...”

“... of the high-profile economists they signed up as advisers in 2015, including Thomas Piketty and David Blanchflower (who tweeted ‘he has no economic policies’). Corbyn’s former policy chief, Neale Coleman, who was often described as the most effective member of his team, has now been announced as a top adviser to his opponent in the leadership ...”

“... are different. They have an implicit guarantee from the state, and therefore the taxpayer, which means that what they do is very much our business.The Trading Game is an account of what goes on inside those banks when they are at the work of ‘finance’, meaning gambling. It is a shocking but not surprising book, because Gary Stevenson’s account is ...”

“... unlawful – did so ‘spontaneously’, says MacGregor, or orchestrated by MacGregor’s Svengali David Hart, as others say – the new legislation demoralised the union, complicated its affairs, made its leaders look shifty as they tried to evade the sequestrators. But the two main battles owed nothing to it. In the physical battle for control of pits, power ...”