“... When he died I had been away from home for a little over a year . . . I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me. Baldwin’s bitterness was fired by working in a ...”

“... and indecisive, could anyway not have stopped it – in his negative role, Gorbachev had less weight in the matter than Attlee in the independence of India. The arms reductions that followed are a more authentic merit, though one of direction rather than anything near completion. If they are one-sided, their terms simply acknowledge the realities of ...”

“... a thorough overhaul, not least of the underlying code: the old architecture, groaning under the weight of traffic, had been crashing, often for several hours at a time, on a daily basis. Meg Whitman joined as CEO in March 1998. Educated at Princeton and Harvard, she had previously worked for companies including Procter & Gamble (where she famously dedicated ...”

“... a retired policeman tells Beckett) and relied for crowd control on pushing and shoving. Sheer weight of numbers eventually beat them; pickets, including Arthur Scargill, had travelled long distances. Heath’s government was humiliated and inside the Tory Party the scar lasted for years. Beckett quotes Thatcher from her memoirs: ‘For me what happened at ...”

“... So meticulously thorough is Griffin that at times the material seems to be cracking under the weight of the scholarship brought to bear upon it, as when, for example, he subjects Russell’s undergraduate paper on epistemology to painstakingly detailed critical scrutiny. On the other hand, this attention to detail pays off in his interesting attempt to ...”

“... and surveys a number of translators who were information-gatherers for their paymasters (Richard Burton, for example, the maker of a steamy Arabian Nights). Briggs lobbied hard for the job of translating Roland Barthes’s famous lecture series at the Collège de France, and, in spite of being a newcomer to ‘this little art’, was ...”

“... their hearts not yet very obviously revelling in their proper course but still detained by the weight of year-round wreckage. As they emerged from their car, a local steel band tried to add lightness, and cover a few boos, with a rendition of ‘Congratulations’, a song once sung by Cliff Richard to remind people that ...”

“... In the international arena, Cuba was like a mighty ant, carrying several multiples of its weight in the fight against white supremacy. Across Africa, tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers helped to secure anti-colonial gains, most dramatically the defeat of the South African forces at Cuito Cuanavale in southern Angola, which jump-started the ...”

“... favourite motif of early modern writing: the timbers of Renaissance imaginations creaked under the weight of analogy. The soul was a ship, and temptations would wreck it. The state was a ship, and poor governance would wreck it (William Johnson: ‘I think Monarchy is the best Government in a Ship, as well as in the State’). A good woman was ‘like a ...”

“... to have been something in the air (or perhaps in the water) of Oxford which fuelled eccentricity. Richard Corbett appears in grey modern histories as the efficient, ambitious churchman whose succession of preferments put Burton in the shade. Yet Corbett, whom we might begin to think of as a cold politician, could write lines like ‘the rustic threed/Begins ...”

“... punctual. This may be so. It is also possibly the case that Ian Botham plays cricket to keep his weight down and his wrists supple. But the ‘encourages good writing habits’ justification seems to me wholly incidental (and possibly outweighed by the bad scholarly habits which reviewing fosters, like making your mind up). An important reason why academics ...”

“... unconnected with what actually happened. Winter begins her book with the story of a young man, Richard Ivens, who in 1906, as a result of intense interrogation and possibly hypnosis, came to believe – that is, to remember – that he had murdered a woman whose body he had found, a crime he later denied but was executed for. His case was taken up by two ...”

“... W. Bush’s national security team, including Michael Hayden, James Clapper, Robert Blackwill and Richard Haass – a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment. This has led to some barrel-scraping on the part of the Republicans. For director of the CIA, Trump has chosen John Ratcliffe, his final director of national intelligence in his first term, who ...”

“... be something in philosophy that counts as ‘getting it right’. In this, it properly rejects Richard Rorty’s model for the future of philosophy (or rather, as he sees it, of what used to be philosophy), the model of a conversation. Unless a conversation is very relentless – for instance, one between philosophers – it will not be held together by ...”

“... in private quarrels was unseemly, or that stuffing chickens with water or sand to increase their weight and thus the profit margin did not befit a shopkeeper. No other Westerner approached the level of knowledge in Chinese culture, language and society attained by Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit, and the subject of an earlier book by Spence, who spent 27 ...”