“... delegations have met more than a dozen times, though it’s hard to point to anything that would be different had they not. Over the months the talks have taken a predictable form. Negotiators are convened. Unnamed officials say that, this time, they are optimistic about a deal – right up until the proceedings break down. The US has presented a succession ...”

“... a historian called Elliot Weiner as he searches for a cache of love letters supposedly written by ‘the shallowest president in history’. Along the way he gives us the backstory of Harding’s improbable political career, seduces the granddaughter of Harding’s now 80-year-old mistress and shares a nifty hack for making hollandaise in a blender. The ...”

“... Yet many marine species that once teemed in their millions have been harried close to extinction by nets, longlines and harpoons. The scale of the loss is mind-boggling. For every three hundred green turtles that swam the Caribbean before industrialised fishing, just one is left. Ninety per cent of the world’s large fish and oyster beds have gone. Seagrass ...”

“... David Attenborough​ was born in 1926, the same year as Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro and Elizabeth II. He began hosting Zoo Quest on BBC television in 1954; not quite seventy years later, his latest series, Wild Isles, has just finished airing (it’s still available on iPlayer, or Amazon Prime for those outside the UK ...”

“... to a church tower protruding through the trees. The tower was the last folly in England, built by Berners to improve the view. There was no church and the entrance door was bricked up to avoid the payment of rates imposed by an indignant local council. A retired admiral also wrote to protest, saying that he had been ...”

“... to economic stability and the balance of terror but even to human dignity itself. Are we about to be displaced by the Ultra-Intelligent Machine, contemptuously indifferent to human fate – or is the Frankenstein image the product of an inflamed imagination, curable by a healthy dose of ...”

“... deliberate. As with Swift, names are significant: ‘Oitar’ (Oi Paz’s home planet) should be read backwards as well as forwards. Things look bad for the United Kingdom when its female Prime Minister – perhaps to become the Lady Finchley later alluded to – gives way to Dr Charon. The events narrated take place approximately ten years hence. The ...”

“... of his writing than with his wilful mirroring of the self-destructive, drug-centred lives led by the rock stars he writes about. Kent made his name in the mid and late Seventies as a strung-out stringer, the suburban boy getting high with Keith Richards, hanging out at backstage drug binges, and – on one memorable occasion – being beaten about the ...”

“... After the First World War Germany was compelled by the victorious Allies to accept full responsibility for the war, and in consequence to pay all the costs. In spite of the work of Fritz Fischer and his associates, few historians would now claim that this was fair. To the German people at the time it seemed outrageous ...”

“... Acres, a transposition of King Lear to contemporary Iowa. Larry Cook is an ageing farmer who, by dint of hard work, canny management and lack of aversion to profiting from the misfortunes of others, has built up his farm to 1000 acres. ‘The seemingly stationary fields are always flowing toward one farmer and away from another. The lesson my father might ...”

“... enduring. Consider, therefore, what can happen to writing when the beloved reader is supplanted by ‘a dark-suited, bald-headed censor, with his pursed lips and his red pen and his irritability and his censoriousness – the censor, in fact, as parodic version of the figure-of-the-father’. If the imagined reader makes the writing possible, the censor’s ...”

“... young men in their prime, which had been commissioned and presumably in outline designed by one of them (Dinteville, on the left), and remained in his family for the next 150 years.North’s interpretation of The Ambassadors starts from the implied presence in it of Henry VIII’s astronomer, Nicolaus Kratzer, a Bavarian. Holbein had done a portrait ...”

“... in 1981, Secker and Warburg reissued his Orchid Trilogy as a single volume, with an introduction by Powell, and it is nice to see this trilogy now reprinted as a Penguin Classic. For his work is oddly appealing, and it is worth probing why. The form, as he invented it in his first book, The Military Orchid (1948), and exploited further in A Mine of Serpents ...”

“... winter. It knows nothing but two seasons: Dust, and Mud. Now, at this moment, in May, we seem to be getting towards the end of Mud. Mud settled in more than six months ago, and has shown no sign of taking its leave just yet. The streets have settled into their pristine ooze, and if there be any bedrock beneath the vast ...”

“... Daniel Farson was polite, self-deprecating, impressed by modesty and authenticity, grateful for favours, careful to keep track when it was his turn to buy drinks (which he often did). Gilbert and George, by contrast, are utterly stylised: they speak in relays, move like robots and strongly hint that there is no within within ...”