“... total collapse. The subsequent occupation was upheld through the use of torture and justified by the evidence of depleted uranium ammunition, a poor cousin of the weapons of mass destruction falsely held up as the reason for the invasion. Most former champions of the war accept that it led to an increase in global jihadist activity, culminating in the ...”

“... scrunched up’. The only really accurate word is ‘Goreyesque’. The term was in circulation by the time of his death, and doubtless long before among aficionados. When he did the Cavett interview Gorey was no longer a cult figure. His set and costume designs for a hit Broadway production of Dracula had brought him recognition and a great deal of ...”

“... was far from simple. In April 1436, when Cyriac of Ancona arrived in Athens, he was thrilled by his first sight of the Parthenon, the ‘marvellous marble temple of the goddess Pallas, the divine work of Phidias’. He counted its columns, admired its friezes and commented on the artistry with which Phidias had represented the battle of the Centaurs and ...”

“... or your browser, at least – to the website. (Cookies do have expiration dates, but they may be years in the future.) Then there are ‘pixels’. The type of pixel used as a tool to gather data is a tiny, transparent image, which you can’t see on your screen. When I first realised that, without knowing it, I must have downloaded pixels of this sort ...”

“... women in love, as it were – is decadent, in a country where there is so much development work to be done. But, she corrects, ‘I’m talking about a country where most people are women. We have a rural country made by women. Therefore, the true development of Mozambique is in the hands of women.’ And it is to women she ...”

“... Algerian independence.In 1962, with independence declared, I went back to Algeria. Vacancies left by close to a million fleeing Europeans meant that jobs were on offer in every ministry and sector. Before long, I found myself working in President Ahmed Ben Bella’s press and information office, where I received foreign journalists, scheduled appointments and ...”

“... that many of the problems we want intelligent computers to help us with can’t straightforwardly be solved with logic. Some of them – the ability to recognise faces, for example – don’t involve this kind of reasoning. In other cases – the diagnosis of disease would be an example from my own field – the difficulty ...”

“... deals in larger ‘what ifs?’ about the underlying rules that structure the world. These can be experiments in wish fulfilment: ‘What if we could live on other planets?’ Or they can be downright utopian: ‘What if time travel could eradicate poverty?’ They can also ...”

“... Amiel goes so far as to list her friends and enemies at the back of the book, arranging them by country with a special ‘Borderline’ category within the UK list containing only Max Hastings. Swire is more sweeping in her acknowledgments to ‘all the Cameroons for not mentioning me or barely mentioning me in their memoirs – this is payback!’ But ...”

“... Council are on the staff of the IISS. Until he stepped down in July, Chatham House was led by Robin Niblett, who spent time at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. RUSI’s director-general, Karin von Hippel, was once chief of staff to the four-star American general John Allen. In 2021, RUSI’s second largest donor was the ...”

“... of June, Andrew Bailey, the governor of the bank, admitted that inflation in the UK – triggered by a combination of war in Ukraine and supply-chain bottlenecks in the wake of Covid lockdowns – is likely to endure for longer than in the United States or mainland Europe.At the end of June, data emerged from the European Commission which appeared to confirm ...”

“... Can historical biography still be written? Joel Hurstfield, who had planned a life of Robert Cecil, the chief minister inherited by James I from Queen Elizabeth, abandoned it in the 1960s in the belief that the genre had had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him ...”

“... of Boswell has reached its conclusion, this being the 13th in the series of journals brought out by the team responsible for the Yale Editions of his Private Papers. It opens two hundred years ago in London, during the winter of 1789. Frosty weather – the widower is warm against ‘the French insurrection’. Christmas Day takes him to church. Three years ...”

“... absolute loss. We have in general come to accept the account of Shakespeare gently offered by Ben Jonson, later hardened and simplified by Milton, as a poet without learning, warbling his ‘native woodnotes wild’. Jonson and Milton both knew far more Latin and Greek than Shakespeare, so perhaps they could afford ...”

“... began. It now doesn’t seem ridiculous to have ‘approval ratings’ that fluctuate week by week, because these are based upon the all-important ‘perception’ factor, which has in turn quite lost its own relationship to the word ‘perceptive’. When the Tories first hired a public-relations firm called Colman, Prentiss and Varley, back in the ...”