“... In​ March, as news coverage narrowed to a single story, the housing barristers in my chambers held their monthly meeting. ‘Everything will close,’ one senior colleague predicted, ‘schools, courts …’ But nothing did. For a strange, vertiginous time, life continued as normal. The streets of London were busy, the museums full of people ...”

“... guild rules and create a new economic sector, chefs challenged the monopoly on selling cooked food held by royally chartered caterers, setting up establishments offering ‘restorative’ meat broths and a few side dishes as medicinal products (Sewell draws here on an important study by Rebecca Spang). The French word for ‘restorative’ is, of ...”

“... the Revolution of 1848 had brought it to an end, stood as a liberal candidate in three elections held that year. Each time he polled only a few hundred votes, partly because his republicanism, though sincere, was naive, and perhaps because of his way with hecklers, who might find themselves tipped into the nearest river. He was offended by the naked ambition ...”

“... IAEA) and eventually enshrined in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The NPT held that the countries which already had nuclear weapons – the US, USSR, China, France and Britain – could keep them: they were the ‘nuclear club’ and no one else could join. In return they would supply peaceful atomic technology (as they were already ...”

“... an air of triumph accused the essayist of contradictions, just imagine – contradictions!’ He held up Montaigne as the great exemplar of the tentative, tolerant essayist. Even in the 1960s Enzensberger was brushing off ultra-left critics of his austere semi-detachment by insisting that he had no use for world-views free of contradiction. He has always ...”

“... for everyone involved in the fields of AI and machine learning. Unfortunately several events held at – or in conjunction with – the 2017 conference fell short of these standards. We are determined to do better in 2018 and beyond.’ I didn’t notice any of this while I was there. Perhaps I should have been looking harder.) The nice people at WiML ...”

“... they fight for fun, or chimpanzees. They communicate about communication. One battle in particular held my attention as it spooled and unspooled for fifteen minutes or so, over, through and around an elaborate array of obstacles, each in turn a catalyst for experiment and improvisation. It seemed to make no difference at all to the battle’s intensity and ...”

“... voters had to battle through icy conditions to get to the polling stations. Despite this, turnout held up remarkably well across the country. Nearly four-fifths of the electorate cast a vote, which was a significant increase on the previous election in June 1970, even though that one had taken place with the sun shining. The weather does not foretell how ...”

“... and unequal. This was a pumped-up version of the Enlightenment theory of doux commerce, which held that growing trade, founded on mutually beneficial contracts and the rule of law, would provide opportunity and riches for all, and eventually consign wars, empires and great-power politics to the past. The belief that market-led development strategies would ...”

“... casts his vote on the way home. He masters the uneasy feeling by faithful attendance at debates held by the League of Nations Union at Central Hall, Westminster, where he meets Katherine Bott, a teacher at a London County Council senior mixed school somewhere south of the river. Katherine, too, leads a bleak lodging-house existence punctuated by Sunday ...”

“... can be exaggerated, faked or feigned,’ the psychologists Peter Halligan, Christopher Bass and David Oakley wrote in their introduction to a collection of essays from 2003 titled Malingering and Illness Deception. Medical professionals, researchers and even courts, they went on, were often reluctant ‘to entertain the label or to stigmatise individuals as ...”

“... the press that Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ shortstop, a nice, inoffensive boy with cheekbones, the David Beckham of baseball, had promised him that ‘the ghosts would turn up eventually’. The Red Sox were at least spared the indignity of having their misfortunes blamed on some hapless idiot whose glove happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong ...”

“... The bank was instrumental in the rise of the modern British state and its global reach, but as David Kynaston shows in his official history, it has always had an uncertain relationship with the state, mediating awkwardly between the private imperatives of finance and the public demands of politics. When the bank was founded in 1694, its business was to ...”

“... can be tolerated, and might even be enjoyed, as piano-players in the funhouse of letters. Early in David Plante’s diaries, we find him tinkling away, dropping names in basso profundo, as if knowing people and knowing what they do in private can be the thing that makes one special. He is 28 years old when he comes to London from the US (a little younger than ...”

“... on Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson, Ted Hughes, Robert Graves, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.M. Synge, David Jones, George Steiner, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Daryush and the fraternity of poets anthologised by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville in A Various Art. It also includes a number of Davie’s poems. If we were to read the adjective ‘British’ in the ...”