“... in t’ai chi ballets. I’m fascinated by the elderly Chinese couple who circle every morning for more than an hour around the perimeter fence of the newly laid, too green carpet of the sports complex, achieved in advance of the Great Event. An outwash of generosity, a compensatory gesture for those who must endure years of drilling, dust, demolished schools ...”

“... changes of company, we shouldn’t have – as we do have – evidence of early copy in the Folio. More important is the simplicity of a notion of philistinism which can fail to see that if philistines created the longest and strongest and richest literary tradition in existence, there must be something interesting and complicated about some forms of ...”

“... vegetarian café called Karen’s. Playing truant from the library another afternoon, however, was more illuminating about the culture that bred Forrest and his muscular fan club. I went to a matinée of Julius Caesar, far more of a favourite in republican America than it has ever been in Britain, at the Belasco on West ...”

“... of times, and, after I’ve decided that this is what I want to eat, I don’t usually think any more about it. But today I’m writing about the history and current politics of what and how we eat, so I thought I’d look at the panel of Nutrition Facts that appears on the label of practically any packaged food you can now buy in America – something I ...”

“... months to help others who needed them too; and eventually walked out over the Pyrenees with little more than a copy of Montaigne under his shepherd’s wrap. In his new biography Jeremy Adelman doesn’t resist the romance. Hirschman, like other survivors, would refuse to see it. He wouldn’t talk even to his wife about the scars he had from fighting in ...”

“... and the writer Franz Werfel, Walter Gropius’s divorced wife and Oscar Kokoshka’s former lover. Thomas Mann, who was one of the guests, offered ‘cordial felicitations on your special day’. Some of Mann’s friends were astonished that he could maintain his friendship with Alma when he had been such a prominent opponent of Nazism. After all, she was an ...”

“... Stalin’s major competitors in the power struggle that followed Lenin’s death) – were much more strongly represented in the Party leadership under Lenin than the Party’s ‘committee men’, people like Stalin and Molotov who had remained in the Russian Empire as underground revolutionary conspirators pursued, in an endless cat and mouse struggle, by ...”

“... has raised to a principle. Trump’s Republican allies scrambled to denounce the violence, in ever more pious tones, while falling far short of withdrawing their support for Trump. Listening to Paul Ryan, John McCain, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Orrin Hatch inveigh against the evil of white supremacy, you might have thought they’d just dusted off their copies ...”

“... that however improbable, teleological or untestable it may be, it contains a nugget of truth more axiomatic than almost anyone would have guessed. Earth system science, which considers the interactions and feedbacks among Earth’s sub-systems (biosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, atmosphere etc) is now a firmly established field of scientific ...”

“... alliances have involved quite so lopsided a balance of power among their members. Nato is far more top-heavy than the ‘definitive treaty’ signed by Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia after the defeat of Napoleon in November 1815. And it is not unique in its rhetorical commitment to high-minded ideals: even imperial Japan’s Greater East Asia ...”

“... swear like a sailor, but coined new words – Anglican, anorexia, Highlander – and is quoted more than 650 times in the OED. He wrote verses in Scots, a battle epic, poems to his wife, Anne (or Anna) of Denmark, and about the Armada. In 1617, he published his collected works in a grand folio volume, as would soon be done for Shakespeare, whom James ...”

“... and creative importance of hip hop, house and techno has been clear for over a decade, but its more recent commercial strength has made dance music unignorable. Money talks. Hip hop was recently the subject of a three-part TV series which made much not just of the creativity and longevity of the music – it had its origins in New York in the late ...”

“... explained and connected, yet the cumulative impact is numbing rather than enriching. The more details one learns of Graves’s thinking and behaviour, the less interesting a figure he comes to seem. ‘My religious training,’ Graves observes in an early chapter of Goodbye to All That (1929), ‘developed in me a great capacity for fear – I was ...”

“... went to be enveloped in mystery. ‘Cutlets, baked potatoes, omelettes – all are discussed much more eagerly than Wagner’s music,’ Tchaikovsky noted in 1876. Shaw wrote that idolatry and snobbery spurred ‘a desire to see and be seen in a vortex of culture’ (even if the scores sounded better in London). But Wagner didn’t entirely mind the ...”

“... convinced Protestant. He and Luther were close friends, godfathers to each other’s children, and more than anyone else Cranach established the character and content of the Lutheran art of the mid-16th century. But religion was religion and business was business: when it came to winning a profitable commission, Cranach was a spiritual whore, a brush for hire ...”