“... 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 ...”

“... calm that followed the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993 had come to an end with the failure of Camp David, Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount and the subsequent Second Intifada. The artefacts could not safely be sent back to Gaza. In 2007 they made it as far as Geneva for an exhibition at the Musée d’art et d’histoire, Gaza at the ...”

“... unlike ours. Even if this is possible, it seems to require of Hero mistakes so egregious that it may be hard to tell whether Hero knows what he is thinking. Strawson and Evans conspire to pose one of the great problems of contemporary theory of knowledge with exquisite acuteness: if atomistic empiricism does not suffice to derive the concepts necessary for ...”

“... rubbish he and his colleagues were obliged to churn out day by day. Here again, I think, things may well have changed for the better. For most modern Reardons, these rending scenes will instantly evoke images of Chancery Lane – or, more precisely, that small alley off the Lane where generations of book reviewers and literary men have known the confused ...”

“... that of the Tories who immediately preceded him in office. If this is true, which is doubtful, it may be simply that he has had more time to accumulate form. The three men whom he followed – Kenneth Clarke, Kenneth Baker and David Waddington – together occupied the post for just a few months more than he has already ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... you desire a copy to be sent to you,please fill up the,’ and so on. This was early May. The idea that they planned, within a couple of months, to issue ‘a pamphlet containing two short stories’ seems wildly optimistic. Virginia hadn’t even started writing hers.Nonetheless, Two Stories appeared in July, and sold out its run of 134 almost ...”

“... W hen David Lammy​ and Sarah Sackman, justice ministers in Keir Starmer’s government, tried to justify their attempt to reduce the number of cases tried by jury, they always praised ‘our judges’. The suggestion was that defendants would suffer no real disadvantage in losing the right to be tried by their peers (it’s not clear whether Andy Burnham’s government will proceed with these changes ...”

“... worse; if we go on as we are, the scientists warned, our planet’s near-to-medium-term outlook may well be grim.Cape Grim, aptly named in 1798 by its British discoverer, Matthew Flinders RN, is a 3o0-foot sandstone spike projecting into the Southern Ocean on the wind-whipped western coast of Tasmania. Here nine weather scientists reporting to the IPCC work ...”

“... which records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London ...”

“... and gladiatorial contests, but there is little chance of the same happening here. In practice, one may be sure, it will be the new elite who will flock to the games in their Mercs and BMWs. It is quite common in South Africa for higher civil servants or mayors and councillors from poor areas to award themselves trips to the Olympics or other such international ...”

“... much like our own, Shapiro quotes the sonneteer Giles Fletcher, who wrote in 1593 that ‘A man may write of love, and not be in love, as well as of husbandry, and not go to the plough, or of witches and be none.’ ‘If Giles Fletcher could compose sonnets to “try” his “humour”,’ Shapiro says, ‘Shakespeare could have done so too.’ True, and ...”