“... true poetry?’Returning to Hardy via these new selections of his work, edited by Ralph Pite and David Bromwich, I was surprised by how much I had forgotten – or misremembered. Whereas Bromwich takes his text from later editions, Pite opts for the first editions of individual volumes and provides a sampling of Hardy’s revisions in the endnotes, partly to ...”

“... all the dashers over the years, from Gerald du Maurier through John Barrymore and Ronald Colman to David Niven. I particularly enjoyed the Yorkshire TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never ...”

“... and repaired church organs, mechanical pianos, music boxes and hurdy-gurdies’, David Sheppard records in his biography of Eno, On Some Faraway Beach (2008). Eno’s father, William, was a postman who repaired clocks and watches for pennies. Eno came of age at a time when you could still get a decent higher education without taking on ...”

“... their right to voice these irrational opinions. I have battled in print against people like David Irving (Hitler’s War), who misuse history to advance their dangerous ideologies, and, at the other end of the scale, men like Martin Gray (For those I loved), who use these appalling events for self-aggrandisement. Interestingly, nobody minds much about ...”

“... would be far wiser from every point of view to allow the law to take its course and, by judicious means, to use these diaries to prevent Casement attaining martyrdom.’ The obvious implication of the first memorandum was that instead of Casement fucking the Africans and the Amazon Indians they had begun to fuck him. The British Cabinet at the time would have ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”