“... 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 ...”

“... in four centuries, few new country houses were being built, and many old ones were being vacated by their original owners. Although far from extinct, country-house life during the first forty years of the 20th century was not lived with quite the same sense of effortless, exuberant expansiveness which had characterised it a hundred years before. And, since ...”

“... them myself.’ She squinted at the next name on the list. ‘Oh look, fancy that, they used to be at university together, you know.’ It was the name of the lady principal of Somerville College, Oxford, Daphne Park, who has, we read here, a history of an elusive kind in Zambia and the Congo. One or two of the other names on the list I had already come ...”

“... over.’ What to believe, Mr Boffin’s chief difficulty in Our Mutual Friend, is also likely to be the chief difficulty facing the reader of Richard Poirier’s ambitious and eloquent plea for the ‘renewal’ of literature and criticism through a better understanding of Emerson. Believing all may involve something close to a conversion. Believing none ...”

“... I thought I had best begin by expressing some old-buffer prejudices in general,’ Empson told the British Society of Aesthetics in 1961: ‘but now I will turn to English Literature, which it is my business to know about, and try to examine the fundamentals, the basic tools.’ As he turns to literature, he shelves the old-buffer prejudices and begins to display instead the rationalism which spoke habitually of the ‘basic tools’ of imagination, and the sensitivity to language which enabled him to examine and test those tools ...”

“... Centre in London who liked to cap the account he gave visitors of why he had rejected the West by pointing one slim, denunciatory finger at that most improbable of culprits, the Ealing comedies. ‘How can one possibly defend,’ he would ask rhetorically, ‘a civilisation that considers a film like Kind Hearts and Coronets funny? Think about it for a ...”

“... few socialists left today who is still drawn to this vision of an egalitarian community governed by the principle of freely-given service, and Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality can be seen as an indirect attempt to reaffirm its relevance. On the surface its concerns may seem to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the White House staff or intelligence agents on the scene. Mostly, however, the article seemed to be an excuse to deploy the expression ‘Putin Butts In’ – a cut below the diction once permitted in the Times. This descent into brashness, which teeters on the brink of open contempt, has been a feature of American media coverage of Trump ever since ...”

“... 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 ...”