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“... the uncertain Irishness of certain writers. Was Sterne Irish? Was Oliver Goldsmith Irish? Was Robert Tressell Irish? Is Iris Murdoch Irish? But the argument about who was gay and who was not and how we know is more difficult. How can someone be gay if, as in the case of Gogol, there is no direct evidence? Yet if you trawl through Gogol’s stories with ...”

“... travellers carried it with them as a vade mecum or guidebook. Coryate met the adventurer Sir Robert Shirley in the hinterlands of Persia, and was chuffed when he took ‘both my bookes neatly kept’ from his luggage. In the autumn of 1612 Coryate left England, for what would prove to be the last time, en route for the East. Sometime before leaving he ...”

“... government. In March last year, the secretary for housing, communities and local government, Robert Jenrick, wrote to Khan to say that he was, effectively, taking control of the London Plan, the policy document through which the mayor can wield significant power over the built environment. In his letter, Jenrick hinted that London leeches off the rest of ...”

“... anti-communist line held against fashionable opinion in the 1960s and after by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. It also contains a letter from Amis to Christopher Hitchens, which is needling enough (‘Do you admire terror? I know you admire freedom’) in the rhetorical pressure it applies on an old friend to renounce Lenin, Trotsky and all their ...”

“... research study done for the Commission). The main difficulty, as I see it, is that, as Professor Robert Reiner pointed out a decade ago, young Afro-Caribbean males are likely to become disproportionately involved in street crime since they are, as we know, disadvantaged in employment, housing and education, and they are bound, therefore, to be more often the ...”

“... the Twenties, of transfusion centres and of the world’s first centre for transfusion research by Alexander Bogdanov in the Soviet Union, which inspired a Chicago doctor to establish the first ‘blood bank’ in the US in 1937, and ends with the remarkable mobilisation of blood resources, largely by the US and its allies, during World War Two. Bogdanov’s ...”

“... had tripped over one of Caroline’s dolls and broken his neck in the White House nursery’ – Alexander Cockburn, the Nation, 6 January 1992. The third argument is micro-historical. It punctures holes in the details, brings up contradictory testimony, offers alternative hypotheses. It tends to trail off into indeterminacy: we’ll never know who did ...”

“... Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol (the future godfather of neoconservatism) and the cultural observer Robert Warshow, whose essays on the movie Western and gangster films would become anthology classics and whose personal mystique resembled James Agee’s without the all-night jags. When Warshow asks Podhoretz out to lunch, ‘I felt as a girl with a secret ...”

“... in the Obama, Bush and Clinton administrations. For hawks, such as the US trade representative Robert Lighthizer and Trump’s favourite economic adviser, Peter Navarro, the question is why the effort to enrol China in the world economy was undertaken in the first place, and who benefited from an experiment that has gone so badly wrong.The crude Trumpian ...”

“... According to this line of reasoning – proclaimed in Hungary by Viktor Orbán, in Slovakia by Robert Fico, in Germany by the nationalist leftist Sahra Wagenknecht and the pro-Russian AfD, and in the US by sub-Trumps like Vivek Ramaswamy – Putin’s invasion was merely regrettable (though Trump himself called the first stage of the attack ...”

“... he does not name them. This is a pity, because as I’ve recently discovered, a source other than Alexander Selkirk’s narrative stirred Defoe’s imagination, and points to the crucial effect which the Battle of Sedgemoor (6 July 1685) had on Defoe and on what is effectively his coded spiritual autobiography, Robinson Crusoe. In a book called The Western ...”

“... ethics survive Auschwitz’, shaken, challenged to the core, ‘but intact’, is the subject of Robert Gordon’s superb book. Its thesis is that very early in his career Levi moved beyond the language of testimony to the ‘language of ethics’, a ‘flexible, sensitive, intelligent language’ that extends his work on the death camps into ‘a ...”

“... as ‘a bottle-imp containing miniature figurines dramatising a large bird’s attempt to strangle Alexander the Great with a golden thread, or a bas-relief of a girl extracting from a cushion the doll of a one-eyed dwarf dressed entirely in pink, or a skull engraved with Old Norse runes sporting a lady barrister’s cap made out of pages … from the ...”

“... the recording of ‘Menelik (The Lion of Judah)’, by an eight-man group led by Rex Stewart, the Alexander Calder of the cornet, whose uninhibited behaviour as man and musician had earned him the nickname ‘Boy’. ‘Boy Meets Horn’ (1938), with its witty half-valving, was Stewart’s most famous solo feature with Ellington. ‘Menelik (The Lion of ...”

“... also oriented us when we were lost. A small image has remained with me: debris over the grave of Alexander Hamilton, the great champion of New York, in the old cemetery of Trinity Church near the WTC. While Thomas Jefferson waxed pastoral about an agrarian America, Hamilton insisted on the cosmopolitanism of the city as the wellspring of the nation. To see ...”