“... There are obvious overlaps between the Orbán and Trump playbooks – from winning elections by means of right-wing populism, via gerrymandering, packing the courts and attacking civil society institutions, to claiming to be the sole defender of national sovereignty. Like Trumpism, Orbánism pits city against country – in Hungary, ‘the people of the ...”

“... of Political Thought (1982). For me (born in 1931) and for many of my generation, ‘Fascism’ means a system of government which angers us and reminds us of the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini. A fear of ‘Fascism’ was quite natural in 1968, that year of wild crowds and top people’s plots. I was interviewed by a Swiss television team: ‘Don’t you ...”

“... madeira and then puts on ‘a damask night-gown (at that period a loose informal coat, not what it means today) over his long waistcoat and breeches. He has also taken his wig off, revealing that he is shaven-headed to the apparent point, in the poor light, of baldness; and indeed looks like nothing so much as a modern skinhead, did not his clothes deny ...”

“... made a ‘five-figure contribution’; the rest was covered by the then owners of the hotel, David and Frederick Barclay, identical twins who appeared on the Sunday Times Rich List later that month with a combined fortune of £2.3 billion.This wasn’t the first time the Barclays had helped to house Thatcher. After leaving Number Ten she had moved into ...”

“... David Sylvester, who contributed regularly to this paper, died last June. People who worked with him usually agree that he was the most engaged and patient looker at art they ever knew. Robert Rosenblum rightly says, in David Sylvester: The Private Collection, that there was something comical about his high seriousness, but it is also true that, ‘unlike the rest of us ironists’, he could make one feel (or at least feel one ought to feel) that ‘art might matter more than life itself ...”

“... that Oxford should not be unrepresented, history for them simply the Boat Race carried on by other means.28 February. At the National Theatre to discuss a possible adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, I run into Tony Harrison the poet. He talks about Trackers, the play he has written and is directing about two papyrologists who piece together the fragments ...”

“... the new study of forensics had given the police, ‘the principle of the trace and so on’. As David Gibson recounts in Planting Clues, Locard was also a keen botanist. One of the scores of cases he included in his textbooks described a man who had been found murdered in the countryside outside Lyon. A group of suspects was rounded up. Inspecting one of ...”

“... to fry). To write about the works of Hazlitt, one needs a bias towards history and philosophy. David Bromwich’s study concentrates on the latter discipline, for he is appraising Hazlitt’s understanding of Abstract Ideas and his command of words to express them. But there is also a historical theme running through this excellent book, accompanying the ...”

“... man. Singer’s story comes alive when he talks about his own family. His maternal grandparents, David Ernst Oppenheim and Amalie née Pollak, were remarkable. David (1881-1943) came from a distinguished line of rabbis that included David Oppenheim (1664-1736), the Chief Rabbi of ...”

“... given to looking forward to the time when the economy would be managed by monetary and fiscal means alone. It was recognised that there would have to be a period of transition between the end of hostilities and the emergence of a normal market economy, during which the elaborate wartime machinery of rationing and quantitative controls would have to be ...”

“... sentiment. The Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser – a guarded advocate – says, and means, that the most powerful argument for further development of GM agriculture is ‘the quality of life’ it promises for millions. Nor should the serious issue be perceived as one that pits a Ruskinesque ‘nostalgia for Homeric cheeses’ against a ...”

“... their admirers, especially those who become tourists of a foreign revolution while retaining the means to return home to safety. Some years ago, an admiring reviewer suggested that Cobb’s only weakness was his inability ‘to bring himself to sympathise with those who seek to exercise power, be their motives good or evil’. In the introduction to his next ...”

“... liberation conceals a genuine concern. Gray is driven by the need to be free of himself; that he means it is made clear only in those rare instances when he succeeds. At a Zendo in the Catskills: About the fifth day there, something happened that I’d only read of or experienced on LSD. I was sitting there meditating, and everything all of a sudden just ...”

“... in which to breathe. The high drama engendered in both pictures by the action of the form alone means that these are large-scale gatherings of nude figures which don’t require the sort of dramatic interest normally provided in such works by, say, ill-feeling between Diana and Actaeon or Diana and Callisto. In the absence of that sort of drama some ...”

“... it appeared instantly and has never lost its hold. To call something a ‘genocide’ similarly means to define it as an act of maximum destructiveness and culpability. Hence the sardonic appeal of a locution like ‘ethnic cleansing’, with its suggestion that nothing more than a routine housekeeping task is involved. Robert Bevan begins his book with an ...”