“... was nothing striking about his features’ (just as it does, incidentally, and with more justice, about Rainer Maria Rilke: ‘features, not in themselves striking’) isn’t going to raise the bar for perspicacity or boldness. Accordingly, the human portraits are not among the best things here: the pages on Vienna, Paris and especially Berlin are ...”

“... for Brussels’. Instead, shamefully, they opted to stand with Poland’s deeply illiberal Law and Justice party when it came under severe criticism in the European Parliament earlier this year (Cameron took the Tories out of the European People’s Party grouping in 2014 and joined an alliance with Poland’s ruling party as well as right-wing populists such ...”

“... office conferred noble status, according to the official explanation, because the king’s justice was royal and therefore should be administered by nobles. The real reason was that the crown sold the offices, and the title was an incentive. Montaigne’s uncle purchased himself a seat in the Bordeaux parlement in 1535, and Pierre Eyquem bought his ...”

“... you, they, are … merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind.’ Donald Davie once took Shelley to task for his ‘loose use’ of pronouns, which showed, Davie thought, a lack of discipline and probably suspect moral hygiene; but the tangles of such moments are not really a mark of carelessness, any more than is the ...”

“... busted many of Dahl’s many self-mythologisations) and the huge ‘official’ one by Donald Sturrock, which, while seeking to bring out the best in Dahl, doesn’t conceal his self-aggrandising side.Through the mid-1960s Dahl wrote film scripts, variously hacked about and supplemented by other hands, including the screenplay for the Bond movie ...”

“... in the service of constructing ‘an order of common prosperity and well-being based upon justice’. The obvious comparison is the Warsaw Pact. But to see the two alliances as in any way similar invites the thought that Nato might not be so benign after all. It is sometimes argued that the US was hoodwinked into forming Nato by clever Europeans ...”

“... Szekspirowski, three-quarters funded with EU regional development money and officially opened by Donald Tusk in 2014. Built on the site of a converted fencing school in which touring English actors performed in the early 17th century, Renato Rizzi’s prodigy of an auditorium deploys hydraulic engineering to sidestep the question of whether a present-day ...”

“... mathematical economist, with many publications in the domain of public economics and economic justice. Like most economists, he is a utilitarian, and this is evident in his interpretation of Buddhism. He does not, however, cite the version of utilitarianism which is beyond doubt closest to his own view: the version developed in the work of Derek ...”

“... were wrongfully convicted of the assault and rape of a white female jogger in Central Park. Donald Trump took out advertisements in four New York City newspapers calling for the death penalty to be reinstated in New York; although the men were later cleared of all charges, he continues to insist on their guilt. Amy Cooper may have known to use the ...”

“... size in the normal run of things? These are the formulae, almost exactly, that were reached for by Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in their earliest denial mode (from which Bolsonaro remains unbudged). To Camus, such thinking shouldn’t be dismissed as the ranting of dangerous fools, even when it is that. He is interested in how human subjects deal with ...”

“... block of geopolitical power, and the welfare state became essential to the pursuit of social justice. Liberal democracy was to be realised via the steady expansion of suffrage and legally protected human rights. Experts in both the natural and social sciences (newly divided into separate disciplines) would bend their knowledge to the development of ...”

“... the full range of Rich’s concerns – which expanded over the decades, from pacifism and racial justice in the 1960s to feminism and queerness in the 1970s to antisemitism and Marxism in the 1980s – has dominated public discourse in the wake of the Trump years. It is also a study in the professionalisation of American poetry, and its imbrication with the ...”

“... thinking along these lines – or thinking at all about the drastic turn that matters were taking. Donald McLachlan, who’d covered the burning of the Reichstag and then the trial for the Times, was now teaching at the school. By the time he arrived, Frank and his friend M.R.D. Foot – later New College and SOE – had already read McLachlan’s reports of ...”

“... multiple media platforms celebrate the demonstrations calling for freedom, democracy and justice which have swept the streets of Iran. But they condemn the dissent caused by increases in petrol prices and cuts to subsidies at home. Until recently, Saudi citizens – in common with those in large parts of the Gulf – have barely been taxed. This is ...”

“... greater fervour. Because he took the phrase as his own, these developments are associated with Donald Trump. But others saw this coming a decade before he became president. During the George W. Bush administration, the senior US journalist Ron Suskind encountered a White House official who admonished him for living in what he called the ‘reality-based ...”