“... that successive Tory leaders have stuck to it. The 0.7 per cent figure was reached in 2013, on David Cameron’s watch, an achievement regarded with pride. Theresa May, on the eve of her departure from Downing Street, went out of her way to reaffirm the commitment. Even Boris Johnson is standing by it – for now. The ...”

“... in his lifetime – new discoveries or dramatic revisions to previous orthodoxies. He may have been the first to place the pre-Socratics, whose work was just being edited, in a history of philosophy that also included Darwin and Hegel. He combined the latest discoveries of ‘scientific’ archaeology with Winckelmann’s repertoire of celebrated ...”

“... one of several umbrellas, is adjusting the noose. Powell’s co-conspirators, George Atzerodt and David Herold, still have their heads free: their expressions – private reckoning, a kind of baffled fear – are legible on their faces. A large man in a white coat and Panama hat is fussing round them, carrying with him the incongruous atmosphere of a summer ...”

“... acceptable. I owe this information, let me say, not to any of my law books but to E.S. Turner’s May It Please Your Lordship, a repository of those bits of legal history which remind me of what Jack Hendy, a law lecturer who started life as a jobbing electrician, once said he had found in both trades: that the most useful thing you could have with you was a ...”

“... time the lonely outsider commemorated by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and (more cannily) Wordsworth. David Fairer maintains that their Wertherisation of Chatterton’s alleged suicide concentrated the Romantic poets’ minds on their own social isolation, on the necessary dissidence of the poet’s task and the short time reserved for its performance. Chatterton ...”

“... of purpose. Such books were not always very attractive or even very interesting, though we may learn to miss them just because their elevation already seems old-fashioned. Last year, the prize’s new sponsors let it be known that it was time for a shiny new populism, and so far the judges have concurred. Neither prize-winner, under the new regime, has ...”

“... and turned a scholar into a suppressor of evidence. I suggested the problem was one mentioned by David Hackett Fischer, that history is what the evidence says it is. If the evidence is fragmentary, misleading or missing, then the history is just going to be wrong, or at best incomplete. No, no, no. That was alright as far as it went. But Spender-Lehmann were ...”

“... marker-penned slogans, or doodles, or quotes from Goethe; a sinister ballpoint-pen portrait of David Cameron and cards written by solicitors Birnberg Peirce explaining that you don’t need to give your name if searched. The walls are a sort of slogan competition, in the manner of a JCR suggestion book or a library toilet wall: which ones will last? In the ...”

“... full of bankers. 6. They put prices up during the festival. 7. They think they’re great. You may be glad to learn that Crawford’s book is a little more discursive, open-minded and generally responsive to the idea that there might be great things to be said about both cities, but for some reason my eye kept digging out the more deadly quotes. In ...”

“... with accounts of visits to Adolf Grünbaum in Pittsburgh, to Richard Swinburne in Oxford, to David Deutsch in Headington, to John Leslie in Canada, to Derek Parfit, again in Oxford. He meets Roger Penrose in New York, has phone conversations with Steven Weinberg and John Updike. These conversations become a way of evoking possibilities as much as seeking ...”

“... generally fear for his son’s stability in an adult and not comfortably Jewish world. The father may not be as crazy as he sounds; when asked to explain his anxiety, he replies: ‘It’s about life, where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences.’ ‘Oh, Christ,’ Marcus says, ‘you sound like a fortune cookie.’ He will come to see that his ...”

“... lecturer, who, along with a significant number of radicals, later fell in with the Russophobe, David Urquhart, and like most of Urquhart’s followers, became a devotee of the Turkish bath. (The mania for hydropathy or water-cures is a little-known coda to Chartism, and worthy of further study.) Included, too, is Joseph Barker, another Methodist ...”

“... Ernst, a friend of Boué’s, he met the Surrealist poets and painters, and with Herbert Read and David Gascoyne, introduced Surrealism to England. He helped persuade Picasso (it didn’t take much) to contribute to the 1936 exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in Piccadilly, which launched the movement in Britain. As Penrose tells it, Eluard had taken ...”

“... Bernhard (1931-89) is marked by deaths: those of his majoritarian and minoritarian translators David McLintock and Ewald Osers, in 2003 and 2011 respectively; and in 2015 that of Carol Brown Janeway, his publisher at Knopf, his unlikely champion over decades (because, for all his influence and cultishness, Bernhard in English never exactly sold), and the ...”

“... home, which faced the marketplace where his family were traders. I took a picture of my Star of David necklace against this backdrop, possessed by some primal, spiky urge to reinstate an ephemeral Jewish presence in this town which now has no Jewish community. I walked around the old synagogue, which has been converted into flats, but found no traces of its ...”