“... partisan politics. Conservative politics are reactive, a poor second best to the conservative’s preferred condition, one of no politics at all. Conservatives organise only when challenged. But whenever one dates the origins of the British party system, whether with the attempt to exclude the Catholic James from the succession to Charles II, with the ...”

“... Westernisation. He is grateful to have completed his wanderings just in time. Unlike Chesterton’s Last Hero, the Last Explorer will not need to cry, at the end: Know you what earth shall lose tonight, what rich uncounted loans, What heavy gold of tales untold you bury with my bones? A few tales may well remain untold, but the heavy gold (with a certain ...”

“... Hollesley Bay Prison in Suffolk is an unlikely spiritual home for English socialism. Britain’s most easterly lock-up, its seaside location, stud-farm and dairy have earned it the nickname ‘Holiday Bay’, and, given such luxury, it seems unsurprising that Jeffrey Archer is now seeing out his stretch there. Almost a hundred years ago, however, Hollesley Bay was one of the labour ‘colonies’ set up by the Poor Law guardians of Poplar in London’s East End, who sought to ease the Poor Law crisis in the capital by relocating unemployed men and their families to the coast ...”

“... world has changed.’ Chris Huhne, the energy secretary and, like Clegg, a member of Britain’s new National Security Council, went further in the Sunday Telegraph that same week. ‘I believe you can see alternatives,’ he wrote, ‘such as, for example, putting cruise missiles onto our attack submarines: that is a much cheaper alternative to the ...”

“... as Freud would abstract particular wants and wishes to the more fundamental phenomenon of desire, so Schopenhauer subsumed scratching an itch and fighting a war to the same category. The Will is a grisly caricature of Hegel’s Reason or Spirit, which is a far more positive affair. Schopenhauer wanted to outdo Hegel in ...”

“... have suffered in consequence, or would have dreamed of disclosing to LRB readers without Simon’s express permission what he had revealed at my dinner table about his tiny little earnings as a hugely well-paid journalist. A surprising number of people have asked me why I published such a diary at all, to which the simple answer is that I hoped it would give ...”

“... to go back home, as Thomas Wolfe put it, ‘to the escapes of Time and Memory’: the historian’s purpose in going home is to recover something left there, some knowledge or power or psychic condition which, brought back to the present, can help us all to feel more at home in this strange place. Nostalgic historians may be classified according to the times ...”

“... On 23 April 1977 Philip Larkin came to lunch at Barbara Pym’s cottage in Finstock, near Oxford. She and her sister had only been living there a short while, after Pym’s retirement from her post in Fetter Lane as assistant editor of Africa; and it was Larkin’s first and, as it turned out, his only visit ...”

“... predicted a victory for the Left in France, yet it is in a sense far easier to explain Jospin’s triumph than Blair’s. President Chirac, elected in 1995 on a promise that he would reduce unemployment, had actually done the opposite; and, faced with the need of his deeply unpopular prime minister, Alain Juppé, to squeeze the economy yet further to meet ...”

“... In a speech​  at the University of East London in February 2010 David Cameron, then leader of the opposition, promised to lift the lid on ‘secret corporate lobbying’. The ‘far too cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money’, he said, would end on his watch. The full text of his speech isn’t easy to find – the Conservative Party erased ten years’ worth of speeches and press releases from its website in 2013 – but the internet doesn’t forget ...”

“... produces a class of super-qualified and clever people who are nevertheless shut out of society’s higher-status zones. The world is split between sellouts and burnouts – guess who takes the lion’s share? ‘Let me stand on the rooftop of my reckoning,’ says Lewis ‘Teabag’ Miner, the narrator of Lipsyte’...”

“... hydrocarbons, not Western oil needs. In 1945, Gordon Merriam, the head of the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs division, made this clear: the Saudi oilfields, he said, were first and foremost ‘a stupendous source of strategic power’. The assistant secretary of state, Adolf Berle, sketched out what remains US strategy: the US and Britain would ...”

“... on? Do you like buying stuff for others, or yourself? Do you resent paying income tax? What’s the most you’ve ever spent on a dress? Who were you closest to as a child? How often do you phone your mum? What would you normally be doing at this moment, if you weren’t doing this? What do you do on your own in a hotel room? Why? Questions like this are ...”

“... Six North Africans were playing boules beneath Flaubert’s statue. Clean cracks sounded over the grumble of jammed traffic. With a final, ironic caress from the fingertips, a brown hand despatched a metal globe. It landed, hopped to reveal a small moon-crater, and curved slowly in a scatter of hard dust ...”

“... only estimates with confidence intervals equivalent to tens of thousands of lives. The war’s survivors were forced into violence or flight. A polity that had already endured a decade of genocidal sanctions suffered total collapse. The subsequent occupation was upheld through the use of torture and justified by the evidence of depleted uranium ...”