“... Pacifists​ are rare. Most people believe that lethal violence may be used in self-defence, or the defence of others, against potentially lethal threats. Military action is justified by a collective institutional version of this basic human right, which sets an outer limit on the right to life. Lethal aggressors who cannot be stopped by lesser means are liable to lethal attack, and this does not violate their right to life so long as they remain a threat ...”

“... or flagrantly unreliable evidence. Her end is predictably murky. Octavian, so the cynical say, may well have publicly paraded his disappointment at Cleopatra’s premature end, but surely he had enough guards and thugs at his disposal to have prevented her death had he really wanted to. You don’t need to go so far as to argue – and Chauveau does ...”

“... were cordoned off in separate, inferior waiting rooms in bus terminals and train stations. On 4 May, a group of 18 activists, black and white, men and women, all members of CORE, ventured south from Washington, heading to New Orleans. Their journey, dubbed the ‘Freedom Ride’, took them through the upper South, where their affront to Jim Crow was mostly ...”

“... locals don’t love them. They’re convinced that they are members of the tribe. Their confusion may issue from Silicon Valley’s own favourite stories about itself. These days in TED talks and tech-world conversation, commerce is described as art and as revolution and huge corporations are portrayed as agents of the counterculture. That ...”

“... to accuse its creator of shallowness. The facility for which Sargent would later become famous may have been evident in the speed with which he painted this picture (approximately seven feet square, it seems to have been completed in six weeks), but there is nothing facile or slick about the image itself, which is more likely to unsettle viewers than it is ...”

“... During the break-up with Kimberly Quinn that precipitated his break-up with the Home Office, David Blunkett is reported to have warned her: ‘The law is on my side. I know because I made the law.’ It doesn’t quite have the melodramatic chill of Judge Dredd’s ‘I am the law,’ but it comes close. And it’s easy to imagine Blunkett saying it, for it nicely sums up the tragically self-important view he took of himself, and of the executive branch of government, during his time in office ...”

“... were never any fights between us,’ Jashodaben told a reporter last year. ‘In three years, we may have been together for all of three months. There has been no communication from his end to this day.’ Jashodaben, now in her sixties, is a retired teacher who lives with her brothers in the town of Unjha in Gujarat and spends much of her time praying. She ...”

“... if research breaks and parental leave cause delays. The junior doctor treating you in hospital may have more than ten years’ experience, across the different hospital departments, and it’s this general medical expertise that the government is relying on to enforce its ‘seven days a week’ NHS. Of course the NHS already operates 24 hours a day, seven ...”

“... Politics’ is a strange word, and the particular nature of its strangeness may explain why so many people feel confused by or alienated from political processes. It can refer high-mindedly to ‘the political ideas, beliefs or commitments of a particular individual’. But it can also be more or less value-neutral – or indeed suggest a complete lack of principle – when it is used to mean ‘activities or policies associated with government ...”

“... as Titian proved, accurate drawing and minute detail are not a sure way to naturalness, and may even preclude the transition from seeing patches of paint to having an impression of a living face. Compare Holbein’s portraits – true, I am willing to guess, in contour and complete to every whisker of stubble – with Titian’s most persuasive ones, or ...”

“... North London suburb and in New York, bears the impress of American writers like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, clever, nervy exhibitionists, IQs-with-i-Books, guys who, as Smith has put it, ‘know things’, writers with a gift for speedy cultural analysis, whose prose is choppy with interruption. The Autograph Man ...”

“... added, ‘to imagine any more exquisite addition to a seasoned ornithologist’s life list.’ In May 2012, the last courser to reach the British mainland – the first since 1984 – settled on a golf course in Herefordshire, and attracted many hundreds of excited birders. This is not the only such record: a cream-coloured courser was seen on the links of ...”

“... from them, the Major Government has slowly but inexorably moved towards the second option. This may prove to be an impossible task: as, indeed, it deserves to be, since only one member of the present Cabinet can show a clean pair of hands. But the choice has been made. The Conservative Party is engaged in breaking with the recent past. It is a process that ...”

“... Stephen Tennant, the subject of this excellent biography by Philip Hoare, in case some readers may not have heard of him. He was born in 1906, the son of a rich industrialist, Edward Tennant, who became Lord Glenconner in 1911, and of Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters immortalised by Sargent in his painting The Three Graces. Margot Tennant, who ...”

“... a Soulmate nearer her own age, was moved that same year to proclaim that, however ‘wide you may wander and far go ... you never will beat’ the wit of dear Margot. (‘Emma’, presumably, would have posed a dilemma for both of them.) Gladstone also resorted to ‘far go’, but won higher marks by extending his ‘argot’ to embrace ...”