“... confusing about the consensus around Alice Munro. It has to do with the way her critics begin by asserting her goodness, her greatness, her majorness or her bestness, and then quickly adopt a defensive tone, instructing us in ways of seeing as virtues the many things about her writing that might be considered ...”

“... have always faced the problem that, contrary to what Mr Podsnap thought, it cannot simply be held up to the light and admired. The constitution is simultaneously a description of how, for the moment, we are governed and a prescriptive account of how we ought to be governed. In both respects (the former much more ...”

“... and so on to their offices. Paley’s version of the design argument took organic adaptation to be decisive evidence for the existence of a benevolent overseer. British biologists have often portrayed Darwin as having refuted the conclusion of the argument from design, without challenging its premises. Nature may be well ...”

“... summit in Tehran immediately after the Cairo conference, had invited Chiang Kai-shek to attend. By spending time with Chiang rather than Churchill, he hoped to play down any notion of a US-British special relationship that might alienate the Soviet dictator. He didn’t consult the British before asking Chiang, and Churchill was grumpy about the attention ...”

“... those involved in its creation, as well as the history of the work itself. Drawing on a diary kept by the girls’ uncle, as well as letters from James and others, Hirshler seeks to reconstruct not just the origins of the image, but the context, both social and artistic, in which it was produced. What she uncovers depends on the accidents of history: unlike ...”

“... the bookstall at Nice airport I notice a paperback with the title Le Chercheur d’or. It seems to be about a love affair and a search for hidden treasure at the turn of the 20th century. I have never heard of the author, Jean-Marie Le Clézio, but I buy it anyway. Two days later I put the book down. It is the story of the pursuit ...”

“... Axler, ‘the last of the best of the classical American stage actors’, is suddenly abandoned by his talent. No reason is given – there is no reason – and Axler suffers a breakdown, aggravated by his inability to believe even in the sincerity of his own collapse. Overwhelmed, his wife leaves him. Alone with a ...”

“... During the break-up with Kimberly Quinn that precipitated his break-up with the Home Office, David Blunkett is reported to have warned her: ‘The law is on my side. I know because I made the law.’ It doesn’t quite have the melodramatic chill of Judge Dredd’s ‘I am the law,’ but it comes close. And it’s easy to imagine Blunkett saying it, for it nicely sums up the tragically self-important view he took of himself, and of the executive branch of government, during his time in office ...”

“... activity to thinking about how we can win.’ Spain goes to the polls on 20 December in what will be a historic election. Since the 1980s, general elections in Spain have been two-way races between the conservative Partido Popular (the People’s Party, or PP) and the centre-left Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, or ...”

“... what went wrong, we can reflect on this historic election. The share of the total vote won by the two major parties changed only slightly, but Ukip replaces the Lib Dems as the third party by number of votes and the SNP is the third party in the Commons by number of seats and will ...”

“... of information legislation to try to find out who authorised it and why. ‘I am surrounded by five security guards all the time,’ she told a reporter from Reuters. ‘Often my relatives or I have to cook for them, my sister-in-law has to make their beds. This is a bit annoying … It gets really chaotic when I have to travel, because I use public ...”

“... offer a corrective, for me a significant one, to a popular myth about the Western Front, sustained by several bestselling modern novelists: that it prompted among intelligent people a uniform generational response, a revulsion of the kind reflected in the writings of Siegfried Sassoon and Erich Maria Remarque. In truth, attitudes varied as widely as do ...”

“... Glover lived in Shelby, a small town 45 miles from Charlotte – were dramatically affected by the internet, whose potential to connect everyone, wherever they were, to everyone else, reconfigured the relationship between the centre and the periphery. Glover’s distribution network, suddenly, was potentially limitless. He began passing the digital ...”

“... her favourite subjects at school (art and drama) and what she wants to do when she grows up (be a dancer). Before surgery she needs blood tests so I go to find a tourniquet, needles, bottles and gauze. It’s a ward that I don’t usually work on, and every ward keeps its equipment in a different place. On top of this, the printer for the blood bottle ...”

“... attacks, she responded that the term was ‘painfully accurate’, and mounted a defence of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, as if the prescriptive Englishman posed the already canonised Americans a grave threat. ‘We cannot be all the writers all the time,’ she wrote. ‘We can only ...”