“... blood-soaked transmutations, and Henry Drax is its wild, unholy engineer.’ At which point, you may well be wondering: and I’m reading this historical paedo-snuff because? But then you take another look at that last sentence, and notice the way it slides – undergoing, you might say, a blood-soaked transmutation – from ‘magic’ to ...”

“... venerated antiquity and suggests a promise (however empty) of social benefit. Whatever Versailles may not have been, it certainly was a public building, a stage set for the sovereign to play the spectacle of power.’ But the same could be said of the sheikhs of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, who aim to draw businessmen and tourists by the jet-load to witness the ...”

“... capitalist prosperity. Instead of the torch of freedom, Klein writes, ‘it seems that it may be the torch of authoritarianism that is being carried by those determined to go global.’ Both identify the chief menace of the modern world as the multinational corporations and their unelected boardrooms. Both suggest that the power and greed of these ...”

“... A fairytale, whatever messages may be inserted into it or teased out from it, is a tale of marvels. A cat struts past in boots. A demon swells out from a lamp like steam from a kettle. A princess cannot sleep because a pea below her twenty mattresses is hurting her. A prince is metamorphosed from a frog (the poet Norman MacCaig used to say it would be even better if a frog metamorphosed from a prince ...”

“... Hussein’s regime has highlighted the UN’s importance and the peculiar nature of its power. It may be a talking-shop, but it is also the repository of a legitimacy that no single nation can claim. Without this legitimacy, brute force finds it difficult to accomplish anything that is lasting. It was because the UN’s founders understood this, from their ...”

“... after their ravages. So although Chapter 8 has been excised on legal grounds, the curious reader may infer its contents from the index entries on Esther Williams, the ‘million-dollar mermaid’. These include: ‘Williams, Esther, egomania of’, ‘nauseatingly self-justifying autobiography of’ and ‘vow of revenge taken by Cheeta’. However, those ...”

“... the ‘crystal-hard egoism’ of the prince by relentlessly exposing him to his own inadequacies, may well have done more harm than good. As one of Nicky’s Russian cousins later put it, ‘the education that was given us atrophied our powers and limited our horizons.’ It would be unfair to blame the teachers alone. The parents, with the exception of ...”

“... charmingly refers to as the ‘ubiquitous cigarette’ (recte, the inevitable cigarette: it may always be there, but it knows its place) looks shrunken to a bidi. ‘Quappi in Grey’ (1948) I take Beckmann to be one of the great painters of the 20th century, his life one of the great 20th-century artists’ lives, and his diaries, the Tagebücher ...”

“... of French women, but she also suggests that another, equally helpful model for American mothers may be found closer to home – in American fathers: unencumbered by outsized cultural expectations about what does or doesn’t constitute good parenting, and free from cultural judgments over their participation in the workforce, good fathers tend to judge ...”

“... involves imputing a considerable degree of foresight to the cats involved. She thinks the female may cultivate the challenger just in case his challenge is successful, so that he may spare her kittens on the assumption that they might be his. But can we comfortably impute this inference to a cat? The thing that does most ...”

“... from Philip IV, also in the female line, but now in the third generation. While the argument may have been relevant in the 1320s, when Philip IV’s last son died, it was meaningless by 1453, after more than a hundred years of war. By then it was obvious that no matter his heredity, a king of England couldn’t be king of France, precisely because he was ...”

“... the substance. Thales thought it was water. He recognised that living creatures require water, and may have made observations about evaporation and condensation. From this, he extrapolated that water was the necessary precondition not just for life, but for the whole cosmos. In his system the Earth floated on water: earthquakes could be explained by occasional ...”

“... language I think in,’ and if such a thing exists, the opening sentences of her two novels may well be written in it. The Manningtree Witches begins: ‘A hill wet with brume of morning, one hawberry bush squalid with browning flowers.’ (You can imagine a line break after the comma separating those disconnected images.) The first paragraph of The ...”

“... of an invasion in 2023. The news sometimes seems to provide support for their position. On 23 May, China began major military exercises around Taiwan that it described as ‘punishment’ for comments made by the new president in Taipei, Lai Ching-te, in his inauguration speech.Why must the war be over Taiwan, which since 1972 the US has officially ...”

“... like Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. ‘Dumb as a rock’ and ‘low IQ’ – he may be the last person on earth who mentions IQ – had no traction, considering that the stars of MAGA include the congresswomen Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, with their ‘gazpacho police’ and California wildfires started by Rothschild space ...”