“... out above all the others for candour, authority, and sheer volume of precisely recorded detail: Richard Crossman’s The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, especially volumes one and three which cover the years when he was at the head of two major spending departments, Housing and Health. I am in any case a sucker for diaries, and not just because they so often ...”

“... Al-Hawsawi is taking legal action against British intelligence agencies in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (where he was represented by Richard Hermer KC before his appointment as attorney general), alleging that they were complicit in his torture.In exchange for the men pleading guilty and agreeing not to bring any ...”

“... can be, the puzzle is how poorly accounts of it read, and how little difference the terrific powers of LSD-25 made to the social history of the time. Leary turned himself into an evangelist of evolutionary transcendence, and seems doomed to replicate the serious-mindedness of evangelicism while churning out a message of pranks, fun and cultural ...”

“... was to side with newness, the strategy favoured by the Futurists, Egoists and Vorticists: Pound, Richard Aldington, Wyndham Lewis, Dora Marsden, Hilda Doolittle. Pound ‘took on’ technology: ‘what the analytical geometer does for space and form’ he compared to what ‘the poet does for the states of consciousness’; ‘as the abstract mathematician ...”

“... In the early days of settlement, Indians sold land in order to cement alliances with European powers and to obtain manufactured goods that only settlers could provide. Especially after epidemics caused by contact with European diseases led to a disastrous population decline, Indians owned more land than they could possibly use, so selling some of it made ...”

“... the idea that we face a new and terrible threat, which necessitates the introduction of emergency powers and the expenditure of vast amounts of money, and then in time we face a normalisation of those powers.’ This process of normalisation, which concentrates power in the hands of law enforcement agencies, has several ...”

“... In the evenings, after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the ...”

“... cabinet secretary, whose own power was further restricted by Jonathan Powell being given similar powers as Blair’s chief of staff. Johnson would give the same powers to Dominic Cummings. Within two years of taking power, New Labour had sacked or moved on 17 of the 19 information chiefs in Whitehall. Cummings’s ...”

“... began to produce books. In the library Kazin sometimes sat across from his friend the historian Richard Hofstadter, who was also writing his first book, and their simultaneous composition was also a form of becoming. The battle Kazin had all his writers fight in On Native Grounds was a battle against an uncaring America, a vast industrial civilisation. He ...”

“... Barton, ranging from American luminaries like Jonas Barish and Stephen Orgel to newcomers like Richard Rowland (who contributes a thumpingly good piece on Heywood). Shakespeare is still the most challenging object in the literary canon, the most generous with meaning and, at the same time, the most apt to find out folly in those who would interpret ...”

“... The​ skills of the three top Soviet spies of the 20th century – Richard Sorge, Leopold Trepper and Ignace Poretsky/Reiss (better known as Ludwik) – remain unmatched. Sorge has always attracted particular attention. Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur ...”

“... is the only peace of mind; and then, spelling out his position, which divine and temporal powers alike were liable to misconstrue unless he set the record straight: no ‘faith but of the faithless one’. All this gives Villon his sense that the lowliest man or woman can be lifted up into the city – his politics, presumably – and serves to ...”

“... in custody. Crown prosecutors in England and Wales have similar responsibilities but no such powers or status: they are civil servants who bring charges, and since 2000 can act as prosecutors. But Auld has been proved startlingly right by a recent experiment authorised by the Attorney-General in which having crown prosecutors formulate charges instead of ...”

“... the exotically novel to the domestically ordinary, from a drug with possibly potent psychoactive powers to the mere ‘cup that cheers’, from a focus of social ritual to a casually taken and often solitary drink, from control by a quasi-state monopoly to a series of branded products largely dominated by multinational firms, from an artisanal to an ...”

“... attacks in Paris, the state of emergency – the first since the Algerian war – granted special powers to the executive branch and law enforcement, and was extended six times. It was initially supported by 91 per cent of the population and voted for by 551 out of 558 representatives. It had no discernible effect on terrorist activity. According to a report ...”