“... circuit of production and consumption, without much running-room for anything else. Some may object that the world of total design is not new: that the conflation of the aesthetic and the utilitarian in the commercial goes back to the design programme of the Bauhaus in the 1920s – and they would be right. If the first Industrial Revolution prepared ...”

“... as Titian proved, accurate drawing and minute detail are not a sure way to naturalness, and may even preclude the transition from seeing patches of paint to having an impression of a living face. Compare Holbein’s portraits – true, I am willing to guess, in contour and complete to every whisker of stubble – with Titian’s most persuasive ones, or ...”

“... a genius for creating enemies. All our self-destructive behaviour, whatever else we think it is, may be an attempt to put a stop to the struggle. And if we begin to hate our own struggle for survival, we may want to suppress it in others. Clearly, our capacity to destroy other species – not to mention others that belong ...”

“... a gift for speedy cultural analysis, whose prose is choppy with interruption. The Autograph Man may indeed be the nearest that a contemporary British writer has come to sounding like a contemporary American; the result is disturbingly mutant. Alex-Li Tandem, the son of a Chinese father and Jewish mother, is the autograph man of the title. He buys and sells ...”

“... right-wing populist party, the LPF (List Pim Fortuyn), formed in the lead-up to the elections of May 2002, which went on to win 17 per cent of the vote and 26 seats in parliament – the most successful debut of any new party in postwar Dutch history. Fortuyn himself had been murdered by an animal rights activist a week before polling, and since little was ...”

“... You’ll remember this. You may not live there anymore, and it might be years since you’ve been there, but you’ll recognise it instantly. Nothing has changed. Not a thing out of place, and not a detail altered: same views, same problems, same people, same faces, same old same old. ‘I feel violent with "hate” against this bloody town ...”

“... Union at night. The first foreigner to fly on the Maxim Gorky was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on 17 May 1935. Sitting in the cabin, Saint-Exupéry imagined himself on the balcony of a hotel set in the sky. The very next day, the Maxim Gorky collided with another plane during a propaganda flight over Moscow and crashed, killing its 36 passengers and crew, and ...”

“... to be more resilient than the old. Of others with an interest in the matter, the Foreign Office may not be alone in believing that we have nothing at all to learn from such countries. Notwithstanding his compliment to Lukashenko, Chávez might say he has little to learn from us. Simón Bolívar, the hero of the liberation of several South American ...”

“... which remains unanswered, explained the real reasons for Musharraf’s actions: At the outset you may be wondering why I have used the words ‘claiming to be the head of state’. That is quite deliberate. General Musharraf’s constitutional term ended on 15 November 2007. His claim to a further term thereafter is the subject of active controversy before ...”

“... sphere of operations. Oxford was what mattered, and what mattered went on in Oxford; this focus may (or may not) have served him well during his apparently successful stint as vice-chancellor in the early 1950s. Apart from writing accessible books about the ancient world, his energies were not directed to reaching out ...”

“... archives stored in the Faber basement or in the keeping of William Golding’s family. No one else may see them; he alone can quote from unpublished novels, journals, memoirs, correspondence and conversations. He has made excellent use of these privileges, and the result is a full, friendly, and on proper occasions candid, account of a remarkable man, who took ...”

“... men and women (mainly men, but we’ll come to that) who are building the artificial systems that may one day, perhaps quite soon, be able to perform many tasks that have traditionally been thought to require human intelligence. The prevailing mood of the conference is one of remorselessly practical problem-solving, mixed with occasional bursts of euphoria at ...”

“... All this information is added to the database without the patient’s consent. Although that may seem at odds with a patient’s rights, it is crucial to the data’s value: if you ask for consent not everyone will give it, and, worse, the people who do give consent aren’t typical, so the data no longer tells you what you need to know. The legal and ...”

“... price of food. The pound’s loss of around 10 per cent of its value after the Brexit referendum may have benefited certain export industries and increased the number of tourists coming to the UK, but food price inflation – which until Brexit had been negative – contributed to overall inflation hitting its highest level in four years, at 2.9 per ...”

“... perhaps as a test of his faith – and this failure of stoicism proved that, pious as he may have been, Thomas was also as venal, thankless and unsaintly as the rest of us. (I should say that I recount this tale here, not for grisly entertainment so much as to suggest possible subjects to avoid dwelling on, should the reader ever fall victim to an ...”