“... hacking at the News of the World collapsed. On 20 June, a few months after Coulson resigned as David Cameron’s director of communications, News International handed detectives emails between Coulson and the News of the World’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, proposing paying the police officers who guarded the queen. Quietly, Scotland Yard joined ...”

“... cloud’ that impedes his destiny? – at least it is the mark of something. So this character may be grandiose in his ambition, but also in his fatalism. And isn’t that phrase ‘tiny black cloud’ done with great finesse? It hints at a man whose sense of himself has so swelled that he now sees himself geographically, like a darkened area experiencing ...”

“... familiar to students of Plato and of Freud – that the obstacles to your capacity to act freely may be internal rather than external, and that you will need to free yourself from these psychological constraints if you are to behave autonomously. But this, too, fails to capture a separate concept of positive liberty. For while the notion of an internal ...”

“... decades that took a retrospective grip on the popular imagination were the 1890s and the 1920s. It may not be a coincidence that both have been characterised as fun-loving eras that chucked out staid manners and stale customs, whose social revolutionaries were libertines (Mae West) and gangsters (James Cagney). Perhaps more than any other agency, it was ...”

“... play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great rival. Given this history, it may seem surprising that The Shakespearean Forest is not a longer book, but Barton became almost blind as a result of macular degeneration and was forced to abandon her work. When she died in 2013 it remained incomplete and its publication has been a labour of ...”

“... the vast majority of genetic variation is found within so-called races, not between them. You may well have more in common genetically with someone of a different skin colour than with someone of the same skin colour. But culture came first in thinking about race, and it comes first today. The idea of ‘whiteness’ continues to be used to make powerful ...”

“... Commission for the loss of human property. What’s harder to measure, as the historian David Richardson noted, is the sheer ‘utility or pleasure’ Bristolians derived from the consumption of slave-produced sugar and snuff.As Hazel V. Carby writes in Imperial Intimacies, it was not just traders who profited from slavery. Residents working on the ...”

“... it might have posed to the Conservative electoral juggernaut at the 2015 election. Nick Clegg and David Laws would have done better to reflect on the lessons of the 1880s. If free-market pro-EU Liberals had fought the 2015 election as a small but boisterous and essential entity within a Cameron-led coalition, on the model of the Liberal Unionists after ...”

“... writer Philip Coggan, and in Debt: The First 5000 Years by the anthropologist and activist David Graeber, which situates the same stretch of modern history within the vast tidal shifts, across five millennia of Eurasian history, between monetary regimes founded on precious metals and those based on ‘virtual credit money’. In August 1971, Nixon ...”

“... if only as a panellist, the strident Northern one, on Radio 4’s intolerable Moral Maze. Some may remember Mick Hume, once the editor of Living Marxism, now editor-at-large for Spiked and a contributor to the Times on topics such as Delia Smith, stopping smoking, and the holiday cottage in Broadstairs he and his wife bought to let for £150,000 in ...”

“... intellectual and emotional energy, when he left Ireland and pursued a career in England. As David Bromwich has already pointed out, there is an English Burke whom O’Brien never makes known to his readers. He understands, and can excitingly depict, the oratory and politics of Burke’s House of Commons; but since he is intent on arguing that the ghosts ...”

“... then were? And yet English biographers, famous for their good judgment of people (which in itself may be a national stereotype, vice or collective delusion), following the good Dr Johnson – ‘I knew that poor wretch Savage’ (probably they drank together on two or three occasions) – commonly do just this: infer fact from fancy. We can become fair judges ...”

“... among its workaholic staff, and an alleged affair between Kinder and Lay’s personal assistant may have caused a rift between the two men. Kinder’s replacement, Jeff Skilling, was a ‘big strategy’ man rather than a tight-wad. He was a Baker scholar from the Harvard Business School – in other words, in the top 5 per cent of an already elite MBA ...”

“... of all the motivations for political action, none is as lethal as ideology. The lust for money may be distasteful, the desire for power ignoble, but neither will drive its devotees to the criminal excess of an idea on the march. Whether the idea is the triumph of the working class or of a master race, ideology leads to the graveyard. Although ...”

“... there was much more to Roger’s puzzling than this. People who know little else about what he did may be familiar with the Penrose triangle, which shares space with Escher’s prints on the walls of student bedrooms around the world, or with Penrose tiling – tessellated polygons that can cover an infinite plane without repeating patterns. The triangles and ...”