“... the case with Alzheimer’s that illness uncovers truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of ...”

“... Professor’s House prepares the ground for the later novel, sweeping the path as John the Baptist did for the one to come. In both books, male relationships are the pure and primary ones. The Professor’s House centres on the memories of an ageing historian, Napoleon Godfrey St Peter, and much of the book – the entire middle section, in ...”

“... who had been a pupil of Joseph Joachim, for whom Brahms wrote his Violin Concerto in D major. Her serious career came to an end when Hitler’s purges of Jewish musicians forced her into exile. Cramer writes of his gratitude for ‘all the beauty which, under her guidance, I learned to admire’; in her poverty ‘she forgot everything around her ...”

“... on press freedom seems to evoke little outrage. If American police ransacked the offices of a major broadcasting network, seizing vast amounts of tapes and documents, I do not think the responsible official would remain in office long. The law seems to me to have a curious effect on the press in Britain. It discourages journalism that matters: the ...”

“... 1981 expressly prohibits research into how jurors arrive at the verdicts they do. When, therefore, John Jackson complains in The Criminal Law Review that we recommend relaxation of the restriction on hearsay evidence in the absence of empirical evidence on how juries respond to hearsay evidence, my response is: yes, indeed. I only wish we did, or could, have ...”

“... be afraid to phone the police about something like a house break-in. ‘It would be a subject of major concern in any society,’ Ms O’Hagan said, ‘that lawyers were subject to harassment and threats from the police. In one where lawyers were subsequently murdered ...’ Ms O’Hagan stopped speaking for a second. She seemed to be thinking about what it ...”

“... In a court in western Kenya, on 13 July 1934, Major Geoffrey Selwyn and his wife, Helen, were jointly charged with the murder of a ‘native’. Geoffrey Selwyn, my father-in-law, died before the trial began. Proceedings continued in his absence, and my children’s grandmother was found guilty of manslaughter and sent to prison ...”

“... of sponsoring terrorism may not be sufficient to win public support for action. On 6 May 2002, John Bolton, the Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, filled the gap by accusing Syria of developing chemical and biological weapons and acquiring hundreds of Scud missiles. He warned that Damascus was a step away from ...”

“... the Sierra Madre, and a friendly profile of its director in Life, led to an invitation to work for John Huston. He wrote an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s story ‘The Blue Hotel’, which Huston did not use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s ...”

“... the nation that existed between Margaret Thatcher’s ‘there’s no such thing as society’ and John Major’s ‘it’s time to understand a bit less and condemn a bit more.’ I felt for the boy being led away but also for the boys leading him, and I believed there was not only a terrible death beyond what we could see there, but lives too, the life ...”

“... is a Balkan prayer that asks for God’s protection against glory, important visitors and major events. Keep us safe from history: we choose normality, unbroken days of small repeated gestures, like the train that goes round and round in the window of the department store.Normality took its leave of the Slomnicki household in stages. After the ...”

“... Prix of the fastest, whitest drugs available. He brushed aside compatriots/competitors like Elton John and called Mick Jagger the ‘sort of harmless bourgeois kind of evil one can accept with a shrug’. If pushed, this apprentice warlock could also recite Derek and Clive’s ‘The Worst Job I Ever Had’ by heart and generally came on like a twisted ...”

“... cultures as well as the ‘Indigenous’ philosophical systems described by Alexis Kagame or John S. Mbiti, was one example. As Senghor put it in 1939, ‘emotion is Negro, just as reason is Hellenic.’ (Souleymane Bachir Diagne has argued that this quote, from Senghor’s essay ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’, is widely misunderstood, and refers ...”

“... in the Spectator, of which Neil is the chairman: an exercise of Jones’s free speech rights that John Stuart Mill would have recognised as a paradigm.Owen Jones, meanwhile, is subject to an endless stream of vitriol from politicians and journalists, as well as ordinary Twitter users, and was assaulted by a man on the extreme right who recognised him in a ...”

“... London dispatched no less a figure than the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Harding. Within a month of his arrival in 1955, he told the cabinet with brutal candour that if self-determination was ruled out, ‘a regime of military government must be established and the country run indefinitely as a police state.’ He was as good as ...”