“... outpolled him by half a million votes. Then in 2016 Hillary Clinton received nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump but still lost by a substantial margin – 304 to 227 – among the electors. Ask a man or woman in the street why this system of electing a president was adopted and how it works and you will almost certainly draw a blank. It’s ...”

“... that there is no ‘responsive superthou’. It’s this kind of conception of God that moves Thomas Nagel to say: ‘It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God … It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.’ In Murdoch and Nagel I think we find the genuine spiritual impulse or ...”

“... have been in it, as a writer and theoriser about both life and literature whose concerns are more timely now than they were when he was expressing them. He’s come well and truly out from the shadows in France in recent years and now we have the first book in English to have been devoted to him. It’s not the sort of book that’s going to be widely ...”

“... known what it meant. Another way of cloaking the same sentiment was ‘cosmopolitan’ – or, more forcefully, ‘rootless cosmopolitan’. In France, antisemitism was far more blatant. In the Paris of the 1870s, the diarist Edmond de Goncourt complained that even the grandest salons had become ‘infested with Jews and ...”

“... out of innate, inherited capacities, how much acquired from people around you? There is also a more communal question: how much of our social behaviour as a group – how we talk, how we love, how we argue, how we get angry – is peculiar to our local ways of living, and how much is determined by our shared animal nature? Geoffrey Lloyd’s book is the ...”

“... ACPO) does not wish the public to know. What panel scrutiny – or, in sensitive cases, the more elaborate investigations of vetting – allows is the exercise of the Crown’s right of peremptory challenge or ‘stand-by’, to remove obnoxious jurors from the panel. The Report of the Roskill Committee is anodyne and confusing on the matter of ...”

“... brains. One is implied directly: start at the beginning of life itself, tracing the appearance of more and more complex living creatures, some of which develop organs that better and better perform brain-like functions. This evolutionary story allows us to begin to understand the constraints governing the structure of ...”

“... shot himself. These were the stars who strutted on the boulevards of crime. But, perhaps more typical of France are the mysterious, enclosed, claustrophobic crimes which have distinguished many small provincial regions. There was the murder of Sir Jack Drummond and his family, at Lurs, in the Basses-Alpes, which revealed, as in a Giono novel, the ...”

“... earlier this month by a right-wing extremist claiming to act in the name of God, inflicted more punishment and pain on the Palestinians than any other Israeli leader. As Chief of Staff in 1967, he presided over Israel’s spectacular military victory and the capture of the West Bank. For the next 25 years, in various capacities, he tried to hold on to ...”

“... His knowledge of the place is inexhaustible, scholarly, loving but not uncritical, and all the more remarkable in that he does not drive. There is something touching about this last fact, as a testament to his own devotion to his adopted city (he comes from the far south-west of Texas), and to the constant readiness of others to take him round. Houston ...”

“... its wish to co-opt such women and its wish to impose morality policing at the same time.More than two hundred people have been killed since the protests began in mid-September and the clerical authorities show no sign of relenting. Despite this, the demonstrators have reason to celebrate. On the streets and in daily life, they have defeated the ...”

“... same, they do. Cockburn has written a compelling book which, like most journalists’ memoirs, is more a series of penetrating reports on different subjects than the mere account of a life. To compose The Broken Boy, he has done a great deal of research. He puts together an unemotional and lucid account of what the poliomyelitis virus does to motor ...”

“... but eliminated from the stock of emotions or even, as Sebald speculates, chalked up as one more item on the credit account: how much we’ve overcome without showing any signs of weakness. In any event, the established German writers who had survived the Nazi period through ‘inner emigration’ (if only at the cost of various kinds of compromise and ...”

“... age of two, was drugged, detached and chronically depressed; his charismatic father, James, was more or less permanently on tour with Monte Cristo, the cash cow on which he squandered his considerable talent. In 1885 James paid $2000 for sole proprietorship of the play; over the next thirty years, he performed it to packed houses some eight thousand ...”

“... in the early summer of 1933 …’ Sebald borrowed this habit of repetitive attribution from Thomas Bernhard, who also influenced Sebald’s diction of extremism. Almost every sentence in this book is a cunning combination of the quiet and the loud: ‘As usual when I go down to London on my own,’ the narrator tells us in a fairly typical passage, ‘a ...”