“... off the social underworld and exposing its squalor, was somehow inherently subversive. Behind this may lie the assumption that people in the overworld are as conservative as they are only because they don’t know about the sordid lives which others are forced to lead, which is far too charitable a view of them. Isn’t it bad enough that everyday existence is ...”

“... dubious Popular Front Air Minister, whose help was spurned by de Gaulle in 1940. The collapse of May-June 1940 transformed him. At a time when most provincial prefects, a majority of Parisians, and eight million French citizens fled mindlessly southward before the invading Germans, Moulin stayed on in Chartres. There, he was impressed by the behaviour of the ...”

“... killing. Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow. It may be the density of the shadow that fills today’s computer nerds with a thrilling dread. But it also fills them with a kind of experience, and one has to look at the boys and men of the modern military to see where the story begins its descent towards an ...”

“... time to leave America. ‘Not knowing much about contemporary Palestine,’ Lahav writes, ‘she may have imagined Zion as an empty land waiting to be redeemed by idealistic Jewish pioneers.’ As Lahav says, Meir must have been aware of the work of the Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner, whose ‘frontier thesis’ saw settler colonialism as a ...”

“... pedant in English literature, the schoolmaster Rombus who appears in Philip Sidney’s The Lady of May. This was an entertainment put on for Elizabeth I in 1578, in which courtiers were invited to laugh at schoolteachers and the queen was encouraged to choose between different styles of rustic suitor for the Lady of ...”

“... to the tenets of Islam, they announced, were largely immune from the debt crisis. Devout Muslims may lend and borrow under certain conditions; they can even buy and sell debt in the form of ‘Islamic’ bonds, but most other kinds of debt trading are frowned on. Al Rajhi Bank, based in Saudi Arabia, and the Kuwait Finance House posted impressive profits in ...”

“... the Irish are pleased to call the confluence of two little streams, pompously or poetically as you may please to decide, I think more has been made of it than either the waters or their meeting deserve.’ This is the English travel writer John Barrow writing of the Vale of Avoca in 1835. Like him, I find it hard to decide on the register of the phrase, so ...”

“... that the world does not give us everything we deserve, but warning that any attempt to change it may rob us of what little we have.Mises was not a conservative, however. He was a radical liberal, as he explained at length in 1922 in Die Gemeinwirtschaft (‘The Collective Economy’, translated as Socialism). The book was intended as a refutation of Marxism ...”

“... on, which enables him to match and make his vision of the world. He was 17½ when the war ended in May 1945. The compulsion exerted on him comes, not from the events of the past, but from a recollection of those events. In Grass’s early novels it is converted into a prose which turns out to be the only major source of liberation from an unmanageable literary ...”

“... cameras from the company that made AlphaGo, DeepMind, followed him there. On YouTube we may forever watch Lee, lean and delicate in an open-necked shirt and black suit, step out alone onto the terrace. He looks north across the city, past the Korean foreign ministry towards Bugaksan mountain. The moment would turn out to be the end of one world and ...”

“... to express to the life what ecstasies and transports of the soul are, when it is so sav’d, as I may say, out of the very grave; and I do not wonder now at that custom, viz. That when a malefactor who has the halter about his neck, is tied up, and just going to be turn’d off, and has a reprieve brought to him: I say, I do not wonder that they bring a ...”

“... on a menu at the exhibition about the Partisan coffee house at Four Corners Gallery (until 27 May) that provided the appropriate madeleine. Looking at the exhibits, above all the splendidly atmospheric photographs by Roger Mayne, made me realise that the coffee house was by no means the unalloyed disaster I – as someone deeply involved in the project ...”

“... plain colours the quilts enliven a primary tessellated geometry with patterned patches. Each patch may have its own symmetrical repeats and their position sets up (or breaks) other patterns. A further layer is added to the symmetries if the piece is also quilted – stitched to a backing through a layer of padding. In plain fabric quilts (a good part of the ...”

“... films in this list, but most of them show their age far more than Breathless does. Of course we may have forgotten a few details. Like the moment when Jean Seberg admiringly reads to Jean-Paul Belmondo a line from Faulkner’s Wild Palms: ‘Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.’ He replies: ‘Grief is stupid. I choose nothing.’ Or the moment ...”

“... that after full independence there won’t be any Scottish MPs in Westminster. (Actually, there may well be quite a few, but they’ll be representing constituencies in the future UK, or fUK. Just to be clear, from now on when I refer to Scottish MPs, I mean MPs representing Scottish constituencies.) The problematic period is the ten months between the ...”