“... nigglers could write irresistible ‘page-turners’ and make their fortunes, why did they not do so? It is a fair guess this edgy Scot would have despised current television programmes about books, concluding (as many other have already concluded) that these are designed to put the masses off reading. It was MacLean’s good fortune to start writing when ...”

“... work, are missing: no jockeys, few portraits, no brothels, no street and café scenes, no music-hall singers. Landscapes, more of them than you might expect from a painter who was so scornful of the genre (and some of them in curiously lurid before-the-storm-colours), share the simplified outlines and generalised forms which distinguish the pictures of ...”

“... would certainly disagree, and he has the data; but, curiously, Emerson’s wives (and children) do not come into very sharp focus. Ellen died too young (her death, and, later, the death of his young son Waldo, were probably the two events that moved Emerson most deeply). Oddly, he opened Ellen’s coffin in 1832, and Waldo’s coffin in 1857, and Richardson ...”

“... produced any better or more effective public servants than Oliver Franks, Edwin Plowden, Robert Hall, Edward Bridges, Alec Cairncross, Edward Hall-Patch, Richard Hopkins and Roger Makins, to name only a few of the ‘mandarins’ who served the Labour Government so loyally. Therein lay the problem, however. They did what ...”

“... and general ineptitude. So – much like the 17th-century high seas – America’s highways are, de facto, beyond the law. It’s hard to distinguish between the homeless nomad ‘prole’ pirates and the military officers who set up road blocks and demand payoff to feed the starving troops. What has bankrupted the US economy is a different form of ...”

“... were as reverential as its title. After maintaining that Cromwell’s ‘Grandeur he deriv’d from Heav’n alone’, that all his ‘parts [were] so equal perfect’, and that ‘Peace was the Prize of all his toils and care,’ Dryden predicted that ‘His Ashes in a peaceful Urne [would] rest.’ It was not to be. Less than two years later, Dryden ...”

“... On 22 March​ 2012, David Cameron visited Kings Science Academy in Bradford, one of the first wave of 24 free schools that opened in September 2011. You can see footage of his visit online. The prime minister walks through the playground, hampered by children in grey blazers, with the school’s headteacher, Sajid Raza, at his elbow ...”

“... Almost five years ago the Cape Town publishing company David Philip brought out Way Up Way Out, a novel by Harold Strachan. Some time later I was sent a copy of the book by a friend of Strachan’s in KwaZulu-Natal, where the author himself has lived much of his life. His name on the cover meant nothing to me – though if I had been more quick-witted I might have connected it to his second trial and period of imprisonment during the apartheid years ...”

“... with the theme of the forest and trees central to the Nazi myth. In a picture recalling Caspar David Friedrich’s The Chasseur in the Forest, Kiefer paints himself in a white gown, holding a burning branch in a thick forest, the oil layered and dripping as if the work was itself the outcome of a pagan rite. With Kiefer there is always a sense of meanings ...”

“... I assumed would be a rather predictable day of protest, of marching and shouting. I figured I’d head home with tired feet, a sore throat and the nagging sense that we hadn’t accomplished much. Instead I enjoyed a long afternoon with one of the many small groups that filled the square. Movement veterans like the anarchist anthropologist ...”

“... only a story – than about the nature of the fictional imagination, about inspiration: ‘Where do they come from, the tall Polish pianist and the elegant woman with the gliding walk, the banker’s wife who occupies her days in good works? All year they have been knocking at the door, wanting to be let in or else dismissed and laid to rest. Now, at ...”

“... stomach (in his photographs he looks the picture of puritanical misery, but apparently that has to do with his false teeth). Nevertheless, the man whom William Buchan depicts is decidedly euphoric. Also nice. As a father he was, it would seem, a very distant presence, but a thoroughly benevolent one, and a figure of fascination to his children – anyway to ...”

“... that, the German leaders were suing for peace. How did this happen? A first explanation has to do with military intelligence. Both sides in 1914-18 used traditional methods: gathering intelligence from POWs and from captured documents and equipment, keeping careful watch on the enemy front line, and sending spies out to gather information behind it. They ...”

“... have provided material for such distinguished hams as Jason Robards, Rip Torn, Philip Baker Hall and Anthony Hopkins. Feeney contends that Nixon had a unique capacity among US presidents for constructing narratives around himself. He renames Nixon’s memoir, Six Crises, ‘Six Star Turns’, and notes that its subject ‘presents himself throughout as ...”

“... to live with Alfred, who refused to enrol them at school. He took them to lectures at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne instead, and to the opera. His second wife, a pianist and composer, enrolled Eric and his brother at the Conservatoire. According to one teacher Eric was ‘the laziest student’ in the place, ‘gifted but indolent’ – another ...”