“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... managed to read one of her novels right through. 6 July. But thinking I won’t finish the book means that I can and do and find the novel ends with a flurry of marriages and (if I understand it correctly) the murder of a child being brushed under the carpet, money making all things right. I will try another one – Manservant and Maidservant is said to be ...”

“... if not beyond criticism, beyond dispraise. ‘I am not unbiased about Israel,’ he writes to David Astor in 1958, ‘I like them all, or nearly all, too well, & think that despite their faults and crimes they have developed a form of life … which is morally more attractive than any that I’ve seen elsewhere, because it is egalitarian without being ...”

“... of one of them. Among the cohort, thirsting after knowledge and high culture, were poets like David Samoilov and Boris Slutsky, future ‘enlightened bureaucrats’ like Anatoly Cherniaev, and a young Communist with a bright future, Mikhail Gorbachev, and his future wife, Raisa, both students at Moscow State University in the first half of the 1950s. Most ...”

“... pursuit, in either case, is hallucinatory and tantalising. Among the characters are two Americans: David Town, who, we hear much later, used to work for the CIA, and was also, once, the secret lover of Qatrina and Marcus’s daughter, the murdered Zameen; and James Palantine, who’s in the US army. Then there’s Dunia, an Afghani schoolteacher harried by the ...”

“... she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past decade.’ David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, gets it right: ‘She seems to be smart, impressive and honest – and in her willingness to suppress so much of her mind for the sake of her career, kind of disturbing.’ Whatever her own views may ...”