“... In a way, that is the awful truth: the romantic dream is itself a lie. In Bringing Up Baby, David Huxley is brilliant and inept. He learns to have fun with madcap Susan, but he is consigning himself to a nocturnal forest of insanity. In Only Angels Have Wings, Geoff is a flamboyant but cold leader who refuses to be sentimental, and is reluctant to tell ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the US as a white supremacist, or Murray Rothbard, who went from paleolibertarianism to promoting David Duke and Holocaust denial – but after a while they are hard to tell apart. It’s difficult to get a sense of which ideas mattered most, which alliances gained real traction, which people knew what they were doing politically and which of them didn’t ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The queen, meanwhile, whatever the courts decide, would have to invite either Brown or David Cameron to form a government, which would in turn depend on what concessions Nick Clegg could extract from either of them for the Lib Dems, and on how much confidence either could place in the continued support of their backbench MPs (likely to be more of a ...”

“... which has recently been brilliantly treated in a collection of essays edited by Jenny Doctor, David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon.* In terms (for instance) of its performing space, the crucial dates were 1893 and 1941 (when the Queen’s Hall was destroyed and the concerts moved to the Albert Hall); in terms of sponsorship and organisation, the key years ...”

“... Western Europe reaches one of its fine points here, like Cape Wrath in Sutherland, Lleyn and St David’s Head in Wales, and Cornuaille in Brittany. In such places we come across peaks and juts of rock which look and feel like those in West Penwith: ‘look’ because they draw our eyes and feet like magnets, ‘feel’ because the whitish crystals of ...”

“... It’s not​ 1940. Might it, though, be 1945? By that I don’t mean we are at the end of some epic contest of national survival, let alone of national liberation. It’s not been that sort of contest, and anyway, this doesn’t look much like the end. But for the last few years normal politics has effectively been on hold as the government has grappled with a grim and grinding task that has consumed almost all its energies ...”

“... On 22 March​ , Robert Mueller, the special counsel charged with investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election and its possible connection with the Trump campaign, submitted his report to William Barr, the US attorney general. Two days later, Barr sent a letter to Congress summarising the two main conclusions of the report. First, he quoted Mueller’s conclusion that the inquiry ‘did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or co-ordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities ...”

“... James Hunter​ ’s work has analysed with utter thoroughness the culture of the Highlands and the diaspora that was forced on it. In his latest book, Set Adrift upon the World, he doesn’t try to describe, in a novelist’s or a journalist’s way, how individuals suffered and grieved and retaliated. Rather, he lays out the way systematic dispossession was managed, legally, by the class who engineered the process and who did so for their own gain ...”

“... Sex, an eminent British historian observed a few years ago, is not an important subject for the historian. Plenty of historians had already proved him wrong, and they have continued to do so: Flandrin, Foucault, Laslett, Shorter, Stone – one could put together quite an impressive list. But most of their work has dealt primarily with sex as a set of relationships defined by the biological differences between men and women, rather than with gender, which involves the perception and social construction of those differences ...”

“... One of scholarship’s more obvious last frontiers, a stretch of terrain that remains substantially uncolonised, is the borderland between those two uncomfortable neighbours, the history of art and the history of science. The reason for this neglect, of course, is that there are next to no scholars around who can penetrate the area with any confidence ...”

“... In almost every way being a twin is paradoxical. I am ‘identical’ to my brother, but we are unique because we are twins. And I both enjoy and despise this uniqueness in our identicalness. While I cherish the possibilities for making conversation and playing tricks, I detest being seen as a complete duplicate of my brother. This makes me feel as if I belong in a freak show, though the audience that twins draw lacks the tact of most freak-show audiences ...”

“... On​ 6 October, Donald Trump made a phone call to Recep Erdoğan signalling the withdrawal of around two hundred US troops who were protecting Kurdish soldiers in northern Syria. Trump announced that he would soon make room for Turkey to clear the area and create the buffer zone Erdoğan had long wanted to impose against a hostile political entity ...”

“... Brexit​ has arrived at its witching hour. Seemingly plausible schemes are being conjured out of thin air and every meaningful question has many possible answers, and therefore possibly none. It is hard to think of anything to say which is not being said somewhere else by people you’d prefer not to associate with. Still, here is a question I have not seen posed elsewhere: why did not one Tory MP abstain from the vote of confidence in Theresa May? The whole process felt a little uncanny ...”