“... as on judges who have to decide upcoming cases in the knowledge of the journalistic abuse that may await them if they decide one way rather than the other. The European Convention on Human Rights, with its qualified guarantee of free expression, makes contempt of court a far less intimidating weapon than it once was; but it is just conceivable that the ...”

“... other brother was a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps and served in both Iraq and Afghanistan; he may hate Donald Trump more than any of us. He is the one who will shelter us in the upcoming civil war: he has a stockpile of guns, the ability to kill a deer without crying, and a massive tattoo of the Stars and Stripes wrapped around an M16 on his torso, which ...”

“... put their lives on the line to save the last surviving ancient Wollemi pines, a species that may date back to before the continents of Australia and Antarctica separated; in Spain, the last known bucardo was cloned by scientists and an embryo with a carbon copy of its DNA implanted in a goat surrogate mother in an attempt to keep the species ...”

“... diplomats have all called on Thein Sein. Each has returned cautious, but unmistakably impressed. David Cameron, who this week became the most important visitor so far, urged us all to ‘pay tribute … to the leadership of President Thein Sein and his government, which has been prepared to release political prisoners, hold by-elections and legalise ...”

“... with the personages of his fiction: ‘There is a gallery of them, and of all in that gallery I may say that I know the tone of voice, and the colour of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the clothes they wear. Of each man I could assert whether he would have said these or the other words; of every woman, whether she would then have smiled or so have ...”

“... of ‘demographic crisis’ and discussed measures to try to encourage Russians to reproduce; in May 2006 Putin announced increased benefits, longer maternity leave and cash payments of 250,000 roubles (then around $9000) to mothers if they had a second child. Adverts on the Moscow Metro in 2007 showed a cluster of matryoshki beside the legend: ‘Love for ...”

“... secession war in 1993 (another $600,000 was intercepted before he could pay it into his account). David Mirtskhulava, the former minister of energy, had a mild heart attack when he was charged with pocketing $6 million on its way to pay Georgia’s bill for electricity imports. Georgia is not a sprawling continent, but a poor, steep country about the same ...”

“... the Church against the Lutheran threat, which Wolsey took very seriously (and which the reader may suspect to have owed some of its following to anti-clericalism). If Wolsey’s plans for reforms were limited, it was because fundamental change was unnecessary. If they were not fully implemented, it was because he prudently avoided confrontation. He was ...”

“... complex: Oedipus was innocent. The juxtaposition of the Oedipus myth with an anti-semitic text may seem far-fetched, but it is given some justification by the conflation of Oedipus and Judas Iscariot in medieval Christianity. In the life of St Matthew in the Golden Legend, Judas’s parents are warned of their son’s future role, and set the infant adrift ...”

“... at the age of 37. In 1789 a letter to the depressing Cornish vicar William Temple reports: ‘I may have many gratifications but the comfort of life is at an end.’ His friend and master, Samuel Johnson, is dead. His ‘valuable spouse’, a spouse much deserted, has just suffered a slow and harrowing death from consumption, and he has to contend with ...”

“... October 1962 was not August 1914 because John Kennedy had learned the lessons of Munich, which may be summarised as follows: get angry in private, think before you speak, say what you want, make clear what you’re prepared to do, ignore bluster, repeat yourself as often as necessary and keep the pressure on. Where Kennedy learned the mixture of forbearance and resolution which lies at the heart of international peace and good marriages is a mystery; his mother and father were no better at solving problems than Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler ...”

“... now is a public health service that is simultaneously starved, fragmented and centralised. That may seem a contradiction. Surely the point of centralising is to integrate. But this is not infrequently a perverse consequence of centrally imposed reforms: you can see the same effect in education and in the regulation of the City. To implement such reforms, a ...”

“... even when they get things right, giving attentive accounts with the salient facts in order, they may leave out friendships and discoveries that contributed greatly to a writer’s inner life. How to supplement – or correct, or displace – a future biography without taking years to concentrate on a memoir? Seamus Heaney and Dennis O’Driscoll have found a ...”

“... their right to voice these irrational opinions. I have battled in print against people like David Irving (Hitler’s War), who misuse history to advance their dangerous ideologies, and, at the other end of the scale, men like Martin Gray (For those I loved), who use these appalling events for self-aggrandisement. Interestingly, nobody minds much about ...”

“... between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws. At the same time, like Murray’s other biographies, this one holds the central ground of its subject very ably and maintains a ...”