“... 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 ...”

“... The weight-bearing ideas were conspiracy and co-ordination. ‘Conspiracy’: a conscious plan by two or more parties to commit an act they know to be illegal. ‘Co-ordination’: work performed together. You couldn’t tie Trump’s actions to either activity.The second main finding concerned obstruction of ...”

“... conditions, and stuffed with antibiotics. Yes, the literally tasteless finished product needs to be ‘reflavoured’ with chemicals concocted in a factory overlooking the New Jersey Turnpike. It’s no madeleine, but the Big Mac is nonetheless the comforting taste of my childhood. McDonald’s understands this, which is why it has long employed teams of ...”

“... difficult. She seemed noticeably lighter than she was used to being, more liable to topple or be blown adrift. A lock of tension had settled, triangulating fierily between her two shoulders and the tender vertebrae that moulded the give of her waist. She looked, had anyone cared to observe her, slightly sleepless, preoccupied. A publisher’s editor sick ...”

“... the Earth’s crust and crystallised into highlands and headlands. It’s rugged country, raked by south-westerlies ‘bred of the Atlantic’ and eaten at by seas surging into the throat of the Channel. Western Europe reaches one of its fine points here, like Cape Wrath in Sutherland, Lleyn and St ...”

“... with the electorate, so that their triumph next year will seem like something more than a victory by default. One model to which they have turned in their desperation is the Tory Party’s revival during 1986 from the doldrums of Westland, sealed at their conference that year, when the party is reputed to have rediscovered its radicalism and its nerve after ...”

“... 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. The justices of the peace, judges and estate factors made money and entrenched their own power by robbing thousands of small farmers – peasants, if ...”

“... 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. The poll was triggered in secret one ...”

“... Hirokazu Koreeda’s delightfully low-key film about showbiz rivalries and regrets. It is prompted by a glimpse through a car window of an apartment in central Paris once occupied by Michèle Morgan (born Simone Renée Roussel), star of Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des brumes, the acme of 1930s poetic realism. The evidence ...”

“... the championship was won in injury time at the end of the final game of the season with a goal by the Argentinian striker Sergio Aguero, whom City had bought for £38 million less than a year before, and even the children hugging their disbelieving dads knew that money was the reason. City were acquired four years ago ...”

“... passed a healthcare bill that had been promoted for a year and brokered in many particulars by Barack Obama. This marked a victory for a substantial piece of social legislation, the first of its kind in more than three decades; and the result appears to have given the president and his party fresh confidence in their efforts at comprehensive ...”

“... draconian laws against the demonstrators. Evoking a heroic tradition of resistance to occupation by Nazis and communists, militant protesters attempt to march on parliament, battling the police, who respond by murdering more than a hundred people. Despite reaching an agreement to de-escalate the conflict, the president ...”

“... modern way. Lewis, on the other hand, wearing the kind of bohemian ‘uniform’ favoured by the ‘prewar artist’, remains somehow archaic and insalubrious. ‘Walking home I tried to think what he reminded me of and there were various things. They were all medical except toe-jam.’ Lewis is dirt, then, or an abortion. ‘Under the black hat, when ...”

“... said any such thing, though the next day Tony more or less admitted that her denial wasn’t to be trusted either, before going on to pretend that he still admired Gordon too, and then pledging himself to the cause of peace in the Middle East – it was no surprise that the boldest liar of all came out on top. Fortune favours the brave. In politics, it is ...”

“... president, he has continued to support their amnesty. It was always clear that Obama, a moderate by temperament, would move to the middle once elected. But there was something odd about the quickness with which his website mounted a slogan to the effect that his administration would look to the future and not the past. We all do. Then again, we don’t: the ...”