“... for Innovation, Universities and Skills in the summer of 2007. The detail of these changes may not be riveting, but what it signals about the reshaping of official attitudes towards higher education is striking. Universities and research have come more and more under the aegis of bodies whose primary concerns are business, trade and employment. The ...”

“... would be the contemporary description. Alas, dignified mutism as a nation is compatible with and may even cause constant pandemonium at home. On that sounding-board of the national soul, the Edinburgh Scotsman’s letters page, I doubt if a week has passed since Scott’s time without its quota of resentful jibes about non-equality and Southern ...”

“... years to spare, you can follow the internet discussions on what ‘quasi-subliminal’ images may or may not have been embedded by the film-makers, but when I was young I would always reliably see what was almost not there; when I was a student, earning a little money by being an experimental subject for trainee ...”

“... spring into sharper relief. Read both and then, suddenly, parts of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, David, Matthew or Paul take on new life as provokers of laughter or suppliers of depth or authority. As time went by Rabelais deepened his sense of comedy and its problems. In Pantagruel and Gargantua he is aware of the cruelty of comedy but seems untroubled by ...”

“... clubs and coffee-houses of London’s blossoming West End, and the perfect clownish counterfoil to David Garrick’s smouldering tragic hero. In his heyday in the 1760s, a summer season at the Haymarket theatre earned his company up to £5000, which may be multiplied a hundredfold for its value today. He had a townhouse on ...”

“... all directors’ cameras are cold anyway. Think of Bertolucci, say, in comparison with Buñuel. It may help to return to one or two of the images and associations I mentioned earlier. The striking thing about the tracking shots in Paths of Glory is that they are taken from two diametrically opposed angles. In the first set, the camera is our eye, or Kirk ...”

“... Kazuo Ishiguro, British in all but name, has not lived in Nagasaki since he was a toddler; David Mitchell left Hiroshima four years ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset ...”

“... machines cool enough to stop them breaking down. A paper in the energy research magazine Joule in May 2018 estimated that bitcoin mining globally was consuming at least 2.5 gigawatts, almost as much as the country of Ireland in its entirety, implying that each individual bitcoin transaction required, on average, between two hundred and three hundred kilowatt ...”

“... chief superintendent of the Belgian police, are increasingly popular among European states. They may find it hard to agree about much when it comes to their own continent, but on North African territory intra-EU co-operation is all the rage. Last year the Italian parliament voted to divert a battalion from the Middle East to Niger; Germany has sent a ...”

“... only a language as outdated as Fanon’s will do.Impeccable Frenchman though he may have been, the French were never prepared to take Fanon seriously. An Antillais, a psychiatre not a psychanalyste, a non-philosopher in thrall to a simplified existentialism, an alien unable to sympathise with the double bind of Algérie française. (‘The ...”

“... it’s also the look in the eye of the man throwing up his hands before being shot in The Third of May. Find no one to hand with whom I can quite share this (probably mistaken) perception so come away. 22 February. Switch on Newsnight to find some bright spark from, guess where, the Adam Smith Institute, proposing the privatisation of public libraries. His ...”

“... shrewd,’ warns a certain Dr Johnson. ‘Be not deceiv’d by any level of the Exotick they may present you, Kilts, Bag-Pipes sort of thing. Haggis. You must keep eternal Vigilance.’ Mason considers himself warned.But what actually happens in it? Well. Dixon is a rollicking country lad, a Quaker from County Durham (‘Why, aye!’). He’s ...”

“... a lady flanked by two gentlemen, one older and one younger.’ Dickens, and more acutely Gogol, may have influenced Roth, but probably the strongest impression was made by Viennese journalism, in particular the practice and perfection of the feuilleton, or short literary article. Feuilletons were brief sketches, sometimes arguments but often exquisite ...”

“... that love poetry was at the centre of things: ‘It seems to me the hub of what I do and, if I may pursue the wheel image, out from the hub branch the spokes of other concerns, but they’re related to the love poetry.’ As it happens, he said almost exactly the same thing about Louis MacNeice, identifying one of his most important literary ...”

“... looms, nature documentaries have become big business. The last six years have seen a succession of David Attenborough hits: Blue Planet II, Dynasties and Dynasties II, The Green Planet and Frozen Planet II on the BBC; and on Netflix, Our Planet, A Life on Our Planet and Planet Earth II. Attenborough’s most recent series, Wild Isles, was watched by more than ...”