“... a judge and two magistrates in a range of cases in which defendants can currently choose trial by jury rather than trial by magistrates; he also recommends that many offences become exclusively triable by magistrates alone. These offences include things like benefit fraud and ...”

“... turn into the subject of a single article. How Eisler and Henze hang together need hardly be explained: but ‘poles apart’ would be a misleading metaphor for them, on the one hand, and Cooke, on the other, for the North Pole and the South Pole have more in common. Amusingly enough, Eisler’s ambivalently beloved ...”

“... echoed in the closing pages of Clive James’s Brilliant Creatures, whose author-hero is said to be a ‘chapter of accidents’, and in the title and precarious plot of Anthony Powell’s O, How the wheel becomes it! The wheel is Ophelia’s, and suggests the incessant circlings of fortune, but quickly, in Powell’s hands, comes to hint at roulette and the ...”

“... Manchester Guardian to write 12 articles on the impoverished areas of Galway and Mayo administered by the Congested Districts Board, but the articles, published in June-July 1905, were pretty innocuous. He wanted to see the local conditions improved, provided the peasants stayed as aesthetically winsome as they were: but he hated the few people who were ...”

“... still shines from afar.’ Judging from this hagiography, the Chancellor of the Exchequer must be very unhappy. The guiding star of his youth has entirely vanished from his firmament. In 1975 the young Gordon Brown compiled, edited and published a socialist manifesto entitled Red Paper for Scotland. At 24, he had just completed a three-year term as rector ...”

“... in any car park on any American campus, where secretaries routinely address university presidents by their first names. Either Alexei doesn’t know what he’s writing about, or this is meant to demonstrate the pomposity of male Caucasians, academics especially. I would like to think that his intentions were entirely satirical, but in its stiffness the ...”

“... Road, Belfast, just after midnight; one of the most dangerous corners in Europe if you happen to be unaccompanied and of the wrong religion. I assume it’s an adaptation of some Gerald Seymour novel and reach over to turn the radio off. Then I recognise the voice – it’s John Humphrys on Today. I concentrate. On the Falls, apparently, men with hard, cold ...”

“... profound account of the collapse of the Soviet empire that I have read. Caustic and lyrical by turns, it is driven by that combustible mixture of love and loathing for their neighbour which Poles seem to have felt since the days of Mickiewicz. As in all of his previous work – The Soccer War, The Emperor, Shah of ...”

“... its future. The analogy that fits is Rome under Nero. The retribution that is surely coming will be terrible to behold. The tale is told in the form of a biography of one of the minor players. Roy Cohn was a personification, but not a creator, of the rot that has spread through the élite of American life since World War Two. He was Jewish, son of a New York ...”

“... There are serious works that masquerade as coffee-table books, and Venetian Villas by Michelangelo Muraro is one of them. Large and elegantly packaged, it contains over four hundred colour plates on a topic of perennial fascination, the villa in the Veneto: but it would be wrong to dismiss it as just another recycling of familiar images ...”

“... banished for ever. It was also taken for granted that unemployment on that scale would not again be politically tolerable. Yet here we are with a government which succeeded in getting itself re-elected yet again with a rate of unemployment which, even if on a downward trend, was still running at over three million. And less of a fuss, if anything, was being ...”

“... like La Dolce Vita grafted onto Funny Face. The unaffected and trusting Hepburn and Astaire would be marginalised or crushed in the fashion world portrayed here. Altman has never enjoyed a sustained period of artistic success or critical favour, and recently there has been an interesting disjunction between the quality of his films and the enthusiasm of their ...”

“... Jean Renoir was admired by his followers and contemporaries for the relaxed feel of his films. He himself loved the improvisatory quality of the Commedia dell’Arte, which he saw as a struggle between ‘the tendency toward exterior realism and that toward interior realism’, and wrote that what he considered to be ‘the ultimate in cinema as in theatre’ was ‘a style and dialogue that sometimes borders on the burlesque ...”

“... I was not able to get to the major exhibition organised by the city of Bruges to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of Hans Memling. But there is consolation in the fact that if one has ever been to Bruges one knows something of what his art is like. To a remarkable degree Memling has come to be identified with this city, whose centre is a preserve out of time ...”

“... Empire, which gave the Scots their world stage, has disintegrated, Scots Toryism been demolished by its English counterpart and the self-consciously Scotch or kailyard school of literature regained the ascendancy. In England, or at least in the metropolis, John Buchan evokes that primordial English resentment that is the reward of all ambitious North ...”