“... This is the second part of a three-part article. Part 1: ‘Who Will Lose?’; Part 3: ‘Who Lost?’ With three down and one to go, it’s clear that the 2008 debate season is fitting the pattern of every series since the early 1980s. No major, Gerald Ford-type gaffe, no obvious, Reagan-like knockout blow, but a careful, well-rehearsed negotiation for minute advantage, contests in which confidence, body language, expression, and even forms of address have proved as important as points of policy ...”

“... This election year​ will be remembered as the one in which two candidates rallied the indignation of millions against the establishment. Both Trump and Sanders actually call it that. The reflexive response of the establishment – proof of its existence, if you needed proof – has been its uniform portrayal of the two. Trump and Sanders alike are called ‘loud’, ‘boisterous’, ‘blustering’; they ‘shout’ or ‘bellow’, and ‘gesticulate ...”

“... To paraphrase​ Roland Barthes, hats are worn to be seen and to be read. They are signs of who we are or want to be. Because hats, unlike shoes or coats, are worn near eye-level, they are the first item of apparel offered for view. The stranger approaching from a distance reads the hat before he sees the face or figure and, at a glance, learns a lot about the person beneath it ...”

“... Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer replied: ‘I don’t use the c-word but I do use the f-word pretty freely and I can tell you Kevin Rudd is a fucking awful person.’) When Pietersen was discovered a couple of years ago to have been sending derogatory texts about his England colleagues to his friends in the South African dressing room (Pietersen ...”

“... What​ do moors sound like? Like a universe of bees, whose unison is only a few notes higher than the singing of our own bloodstream, which we half-hear, half-sense during the small hours between sleeps. What do they smell like? Like honey, steeping the sunshine. What do they look like? Like a brown and purple cloud-shadow spread out across the uplands, described by William Atkins in characteristically fine focus when he says of the North Yorkshire moors that ‘the new blooms were silverish specks; they were pale grey, beige and mint green ...”

“... In The Return of Ulysses Edith Hall takes us on a tour of global culture high and low, mostly from the last hundred years, to demonstrate how Homer’s great poem continues to permeate our sensibility and imagination. She is an informative and enthusiastic guide, and the sheer wealth of her examples is impressive. But the tour rarely stops at any given poem, novel, film, play, painting, opera or ballet for longer than two paragraphs, and readers can be forgiven for feeling a bit disoriented as they travel to the chapter’s next destination ...”

“... This book​ is almost parodically characteristic of Robert Macfarlane’s work. He is a scholar of place – of terrain, terroir, the land – and at times references, sources and citations have bulked uncomfortably large in his writing. Certainly he frequents the countryside at close quarters and often strenuously. He sleeps out, on mountains and moors ...”

“... In the first half​ of the 19th century radical reformers argued that Britain needed three things if it was ever going to become a real democracy: secret ballots, universal suffrage and annual elections. We got the ballot; we eventually got the suffrage; but in an age of fixed-term five-year parliaments, annual elections are as remote as ever. Nineteenth-century democrats knew that having an election every year would be clumsy and time-consuming (the US House of Representatives, which does it every two years, is proof of that ...”

“... I never thought I would find myself writing warmly about a book by a Scottish laird. Adam Nicolson owns the Shiant Islands, east of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. The Shiants are a compact cluster and, like all small islands, offer the marvellous sense that you can encompass them, you can easily walk or sail round them and get to know each rock-face or sand-bar, each vein of water or peat-hagg lip ...”

“... For a country with one of the oldest book-making traditions in Europe, Ireland was a late arrival on the magazine scene: Tom Clyde’s first example is Swift’s Examiner, started in 1710, ‘written purely for English consumption, and reprinted in Dublin, unchanged, only as an afterthought’. A rash of Tatler imitators gave way to more nationally minded miscellanies by the mid-century, but the first golden age of the Irish magazine was the 1790s ...”

“... We still live​ among wild animals, just about: the birds that flit and scurry and sing and build in our gardens. They are like iridescent spray: the rose-flush on the breast of a male chaffinch, the gold ring round the eye of a blackbird, the jet-black cap above the slatey body of a great tit. Sparrows are said to have become much less common, but 31 of them have frequented my garden in the past seven days, to say nothing of blackbirds, collared doves, coal tits, starlings, chaffinches, a song thrush, a dunnock, a woodpigeon and a great tit, and that during a typical spring week in a village of 630 households on a detrunked A-road, half a mile from a motorway and a little more from the Glasgow-Euston railway line ...”

“... Many​ political scientists were utterly confounded when Trump won the presidency in 2016. A large number had staked their professional reputations on confident predictions that Hillary Clinton would brush him aside. But when the result came in those same political scientists were kicking themselves for not having seen it coming. What happened turned out to fit pretty well with the outcome their models might have predicted ...”

“... much zest into a feeble allegory. In his excellent critical biography of Tati, published in 1999, David Bellos points out that less than three years before he began shooting the film (in May 1947) the Gestapo still had an office on the main square of Sainte-Sévère. And now American movies and military policemen are the problem?Many of the best scenes in ...”

“... the Border hills near Beattock on the way to South Uist and Barra. At Oban I’ll rendezvous with David Paterson, a landscape photographer, who’s working with me on a book on the Highland Clearances. As I overtake a worn blue Audi estate, I look sideways and see Dave’s face and grizzled beard. We exchange incoherent signs, pull in a little later on the ...”

“... Inquiry, Jonathan Powell, the prime minister’s chief of staff, wrote to Alastair Campbell and David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser, of an early draft of the September dossier on Iraq’s WMD programme: ‘I think it is worth explicitly stating what TB keeps saying: this is the advice from the Joint Intelligence Committee. On the basis of this ...”