“... 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 No one else may see them; he alone can quote from unpublished novels, journals, memoirs, correspondence and conversations.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 ...”

“... added, ‘to imagine any more exquisite addition to a seasoned ornithologist’s life list.’ In May 2012, the last courser to reach the British mainland – the first since 1984 – settled on a golf course in Herefordshire, and attracted many hundreds of excited birders. This is not the only such record: a cream-coloured courser was seen on the links of ...”

“... In May​ 1976, two families of Asian immigrants from Malawi – UK passport-holders – were put up in a hotel while social workers decided what to do with their children. The Sun ran it as a front page story: ‘Scandal of £600 a week Asians’. The Mirror followed up by condemning a ‘New Flood of Asians into Britain ...”

“... situation – in which unregulated firms exploit a rapidly increasing employment asymmetry – may well be unsustainable. Most workers are reluctant to give up job security for the ‘independence’ afforded by gig work unless they have to – in a slack labour market, for example, where there is a surplus of labour. When there is a labour shortage, the ...”

“... loud? Perhaps you only thought you did. One person who is under no illusion about comedy – who may never have found it funny in the first place – is the comic. We all know the old joke about the man who goes to the doctor, depressed, and is told to see the famous clown Pagliacci perform: no cure better than laughter. ‘But doctor,’ the man says, ‘I ...”

“... loss, riches, invention, triumph – all justified and interesting avenues. But texts may suggest something else: agreement, for example, or honourable hard work. In Proust’s case, when the topic is memory and chance, the convergences are remarkable. The original text says, ‘Il y a beaucoup de hasard en tout ceci,’ and we get to read, in the ...”

“... inevitable. The would-be poet, essayist, novelist or dramatist, Johnson repeatedly suggests, ‘may be considered as a kind of general challenger, whom everyone has a right to attack … To commence author is to claim praise, and no man can justly aspire to honour, but at the hazard of disgrace.’ At once heroic and faintly absurd, this quixotic vision of ...”

“... for the righteous. (As Star is the first to admit, scholars of Jewish and Christian apocalypse may find his texts do not always satisfy their criteria for the apocalyptic.) Apocalypse for the Greeks and Romans was not a call to prepare for a heavenly kingdom, but closer to its modern, colloquial sense and part of a broader philosophical effort to improve ...”