“... to come across the wispy voice of Leonard Woolf, asked in an interview broadcast by the BBC on 23 May 1964 to define his wife’s ‘genius’ or ‘special attributes’. ‘Normally,’ he responded,she was extremely happy and enjoyed all the usual things of life, but every now and then in conversation, for instance, she would do what I call leave the ...”

“... programme had been derailed and Balladur was out of pocket, as Chirac had intended. In May 2002, as Chirac was re-elected to a second term, a bomb killed eleven French engineers on a bus near a naval dockyard in Karachi, where they were working with their Pakistani counterparts. The attack was carried out by a jihadist franchise, probably ...”

“... developing the US’s new maritime strategy, aimed at restricting Soviet freedom of movement. In May 1983 he was promoted to assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, and over the next couple of years he oversaw a secret team – operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff – which quietly ...”

“... is how you stop it,’ he is told. ‘Stop what?’ ‘The Aids.’ The book begins in May 1988, not the best time to be a gay man anywhere, let alone here.The play being cast and rehearsed is an odd choice: John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes, first staged in 1967 and adapted for film in 1971. It’s set in a prison and shows the power ...”

“... Henry James – and not just the imagination, we might add. In this light, Trilling then says, we may feel that Tolstoy ‘gives us, after all, not reality itself but a sort of idyll of reality’. This is very intriguing, and a long way – too far, probably – from the old claim made by Babel and so many others. It was much in my mind as I read this new ...”

“... that embellished him made him an angel.’ Besides the complexes that blokes in the 21st century may have about castration and the shivering joy many take in explaining all this to a psychoanalyst, there is another reason the castrato may continue to fascinate us. It is the old idea that while heard melodies are ...”

“... trafficking of migrants to Greece – on a country, that is, whose human rights record suggests it may not be particularly careful when dealing with Syrian or any other refugees. Of course, Turkish co-operation had a price, and though Merkel had in the past steadfastly opposed the country’s bid for EU membership, now, having changed tack again and speaking ...”

“... of 29, attainted for treason and supposedly drowned in a butt of malmsey. The barrel, though, may have been strung on Margaret after her death. The picture was cleaned in 1973, and study suggested that some original features have almost vanished. A pearl necklace is just a shadow now. The hands are the standard-issue long-fingered type; a black ...”

“... helped foster a revolution in sexual mores, politics and drug consumption? Schütte thinks they may be even more important than that. ‘Could, for example, techno have emerged from inner-city areas of Detroit without them?’ The link can’t be denied, but it’s something else to claim techno wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Kraftwerk. Techno ...”

“... later decades was still insisting that it was an enemy within the gates ‘run by reds’. As this may suggest, his interventions were not always well grounded. During the war, he personally rang the duty controller at Broadcasting House to complain about an item he said he had just heard on the nine o’clock news. The controller was able to point ...”

“... R., who’s in turmoil over developments at the magazine and has pretty much decided to resign.10 May, Yorkshire. From being an unqualified admirer of Philip Roth, which I still pretty much am, I feel (as I did about Francis Bacon) that I’ve been told too much. On the plus side he’s very generous, helping friends down on their luck, dispensing large sums ...”

“... the gallows, which is so placed respecting the town, that the towns people from the High-Street may sit at their shop doors, and see the criminals executed.’ In this passage (brought to my attention by Lincoln Faller, who uses it effectively in his forthcoming book on Defoe), the reader is invited to share the pain of travel, including seeing too ...”

“... belief that the Chinese care little about individual or human rights, however difficult these may be to realise in a Chinese context, should not survive a reading of these pages. ‘In my first year at university I felt I was surrounded by people in chains. But occasionally I would read Sartre. I was struck by his theory that to exist in this world means ...”

“... have no Geist. And what, pray, is Geist? It is, of course, many things. In the present context, it may be defined as speculative intellect in excess of material facts. In its awareness of this chronic excess (for it is self-conscious through and through), Geist turns either aggressive and destructive, or habitually melancholy, in its attitude to the world of ...”

“... conclusions which so filled him with fright that he preferred to lock them away in his heart. He may (or he may not) have surmised that in the last analysis he aimed at something beyond the pale of Christianity; that, thought to the end, his true design was once for all to wreck the wall of fixed causes with their dogmas ...”