“... and has never really lost it. It has only just dawned on me that it might happen to me: indeed, may have happened already. I now go to the gym three times a week. I eat salad for lunch. People tell me how well I look. I suppose that means I must have been fat until recently and just didn’t realise it. Which makes me wonder: at what point are you thin and ...”

“... which we require if we are to believe on similarly rational grounds that God does not exist may not differ from each other in significant ways. Generally, when questions of existence are in doubt, the onus of justification lies with those who maintain that something of such and such a kind does exist, and generally therefore it is reasonable to continue ...”

“... were more and more professionally organised, and more and more separate from their public. Robert Peel complained in the 1840s about the difficulty of justifying government support for astronomy to a Parliament of country gentlemen. Science was specialised, divided, demarcated. At the same time Peel’s problems could have been solved by keeping the ...”

“... finding somewhere on the South Island a bit like ‘the Lake District’. The man who catches her, Robert Lemoine, an American billionaire and former CEO of a drone manufacturer, shuttles between disguises of his own: doomsday prepper, wannabe media baron, and, on occasion, an imaginary commanding officer at the CIA’s Special Operations Group called Lt Col ...”

“... His decision to buy the Aranda (now in the Frick Pittsburgh, the museum’s sister institution) may have been sparked by his first visit to Europe, undertaken the previous year with Andrew Mellon, who would go on to form another of the great American art collections of the early 20th century. If Frick’s trip to Europe opened his eyes to the possibilities ...”

“... of curiosity: historical, technical, geographical. The result falls short of the masterpiece that Robert Penn Warren hails on the jacket. It needs a bigger and better-stocked mind to carry the reader from one individually satisfying sketch to another over such a long span. But for a writer’s first published book it is a formidable achievement, combining the ...”

“... and regulate social life by working through civil society. Despotically ‘strong’ states may be infrastructurally ‘weak’, and vice versa. What is urgently needed in Russia today – and throughout the ex-Communist bloc and the Third World – is an infrastructurally strong state, one that can keep the peace, punish force and fraud, enforce ...”

“... understand that you simply can’t leave the Politburo and Council of Commissars to Kuibyshev (he may start drinking) or to Kaganovich for long?’ Molotov had to return from vacation early, and Stalin with rare politeness remarked that this made him ‘a little uncomfortable’. Stalin could rely on Molotov’s complete loyalty. In the long series of ...”

“... influence good. He hardly recognises – strange in a historian of refugees – that isolation may be necessary and justified; and that it might lead to more important contributions either to scholarship or to public life than immediate acceptance. He seems oblivious to the fact that ‘influence’ does not stand outside history. His brief discussion of ...”

“... be homeless in New York.’ The chaplain from Catch-22 reappears, his name strangely changed from Robert Oliver Shipman to Albert Taylor Tappman, but complete with a close to verbatim quotation from the earlier book about his fantasies of the harm that could come to his family. He is still helpless and well-meaning. Here as in Catch-22, ‘immoral logic ...”

“... Coward (1992) will have gathered what close friendship sometimes, though not always, meant. They may be more shocked to learn from Hoare (quoting Robin Maugham) that in youth Coward was a gifted and audacious shoplifter (‘a daredevil game many adolescents play’). Hoare tells us that in the spring of 1918 the precocious Coward, 18 years old, received a ...”

“... just happened, and then develop it into a metaphor for an existential quest. Her title, taken from Robert Frost (‘I have it in me so much nearer home/To scare myself with my own desert places’), shifts the focus from the real journey to the inner one. In a Prelude to the book, she seems to allude to Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’: ‘Sometimes it seems ...”

“... are 101 of them and their total length is considerably less than 1000 lines), he recalls Robert Graves’s suggestion that the long poem may be ‘nothing more than a poet’s attempt at greatness, at becoming “major” ’. While, on the one hand, Armitage asserts that ‘today, it is still the short poem that ...”

“... which has cost the taxpayer nothing’. But what if it had been – oh, I don’t know . . . Robert Hughes, or Rolf Harris – sitting on a bed, looming over a naked 16-year-old girl, blowing the petals away from her mons veneris? Greer’s argument that modern society has forbidden women the pleasure of boys’ bodies is almost wrecked by the ...”

“... found no human presence, and there is no archaeological record of pre-European colonisation. This may be one of the very few cases in the New World in which the word ‘discovery’ is not a misnomer. In Evolution’s Workshop, his chronological account of the biological exploration of the islands, Edward Larson tells the colourful story of the visitors who ...”