“... opposite but its dark underbelly. Liberal democracies have always relied on brutality that took place out of sight – or at least out of mind. In the United States, democracy was considered compatible with slavery. Today, according to Mbembe, the ‘most accomplished form of necropower is the … colonial occupation of Palestine’. In Gaza, even ...”

“... sweatshop version of Vivienne Westwood. There are jokey names (Page and Turner for a publisher, John Elton for an American literary agent with a disfiguring hair transplant) and passages of broad pastiche, such as this from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards her, “keep thy wit for ...”

“... Hannen, President of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the Court of Appeal; and Sir John Day and Sir Archibald Levin Smith, both from the High Court: ‘Unionists to a man,’ as Roy Jenkins describes them in his Life of Gladstone. But what were these judges thinking of, presiding over a tribunal to which none of the ordinary rules applied, set ...”

“... Spender’s son Matthew was ten years old, he caught his hand in a car door. ‘The event,’ John Sutherland writes, ‘recalled other tragedies in the boy’s little life; the running over, for example, of his dog Bobby – a "rather lugubrious looking spaniel” and a present from his godmother, Edith Sitwell. Six-year-old Matthew had been disappointed ...”

“... operators to space warfighters’. But the vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, John E. Hyten, has described space war as ‘inevitable’.The American strategeion sees itself as waging a constant battle against complacency. To ward this off, the political class periodically conjures up imminent threats to US superiority. In the 1990s the ...”

“... in the world,’ Franklin-Wallis writes, ‘that give you a better view of humanity than a dump.’John Scanlan​’s The Idea of Waste reminds us that waste is a relative concept. By this he means partly that what looks like waste to one person – to you and me, say – might not look like waste to one of the waste-pickers at Ghazipur. But more ...”

“... make it wonderfully and hand it over to her neighbours.’ Munira could speak some Punjabi and she took Rania and the other women to Southall for piercing and waxing.‘I love you so much,’ Rania messaged her husband when he was away. ‘I miss that naughty little boy.’ Rania’s new friends thought it was odd for someone from her culture to be so openly ...”

“... renaissance, is also concerned with what might have been, and with a legend which has run from Sir John Holles to S.R. Gardiner. He shows Henry as heir to the aspirations of the Sidney circle, a patron of the arts, and a champion of the Protestant cause. Whether the English financial system would have permitted Henry as king to have championed the Protestant ...”

“... It was not coincidental that the first American revival of Julius Caesar which restored this scene took place in 1937, when books were being burned in Germany: Orson Welles portrayed the plebeians who murder Cinna as Fascist Brown-shirts. In 1937, in 1599, Julius Caesar dramatised an attack on a poet, at a time when poets were being attacked outside the ...”

“... inconsistency unperceived by the speaker’. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Ricks quotes Sir John Mahaffy’s answer, when asked to distinguish the Irish bull from similar freaks of language: ‘The Irish bull is always pregnant.’ More often than the OED appreciates, the Irish bull knows he’s pregnant and is offering his audience an occasion to ...”

“... ovulation is spontaneous, and not the result of female orgasm, was discovered in the 1820s, but took thirty years or more to spread through the medical profession, and longer still to get through to patients. This ancient fallacy presumably encouraged men who wanted children to attend to their wives’ sexual needs. But what about couples who wanted to stop ...”

“... the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary do the same. In one historian’s words, Balfour took up Zionism as a kind of hobby, and the Declaration that bears his name was less the outcome of a serious examination of British or Allied interests than of his own uninformed infatuation – he did not think the Arab problem was serious or that Zionism would ...”

“... as accurately as possible the many dialects and regional accents he encountered) noted: ‘I took down what he had to say, just as he said it – without altering a word or adding one.’ He did this because he ‘wished to preserve the memory of the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker I ever came across. He did not tell me a single remarkable ...”

“... signed the certificates accepting the plant – although he knew it was sub-standard. The director took his grandchildren away, but did not alert the town. Furthermore, he got the job through pulling strings. The confrontation is heated and believable. At its height Bessmertny intrudes with a pungent suggestion. You’re building the pyramids – the tombs of ...”

“... believed, as Eliot did, in a fatal dissociation of English sensibility, except that for Eliot it took place in the 17th century, when Cromwell managed to ‘ruin the great work of time’, as Marvell put it, whereas for Davie it happened in the 18th century, when a sturdy but accommodating Dissent gave way to ranting Methodism and the amorphous tolerance of ...”