“... Among​ Shakespeare’s tragedies Julius Caesar is unusual in not being named for its hero. By any conventional measure, the play is the tragedy of Brutus, over whose corpse his antagonist Antony declares at the end of Act V: ‘This was the noblest Roman of them all.’ Still, it makes sense that the tragedy of Brutus should be called Julius Caesar, since Caesar is the figure around whom Brutus’ story revolves ...”

“... you considered the consequences of writing about your children? … How will it be for them when they grow up?’ his mother-in-law asks. Meanwhile his uncle is planning to sue him (this is the story part of the first few hundred pages of the novel, which has about 1100 of them, incidentally).Q. Is it anything like Proust?A. Not at ...”

“... the US space force was established as the sixth branch of the US armed forces. Though founded by the Trump administration, the space force was not a Trump invention. Its precursor, air force space command, was set up in 1982. In 2001, a commission chaired by Donald Rumsfeld concluded that it was being neglected, and ...”

“... his period.Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless NightsOh, God, what depressing places hotel bedrooms can be.Jean Rhys, QuartetThe​ image on the front of Late Fragments is a portrait taken by the Belgian photographer Charles Neyt in 1864. Start with those eyes: distrustful, assessing, imperious. An art critic’s eyes. Rakish ...”

“... deliberate cover enabling him to suborn those politically committed to the left. (As will be seen, King’s has a tradition of involvement with the Secret Service: Sir Francis Walsingham ran it for Elizabeth I.) Today the hounds are in pursuit of Andrew Gow, the Classical scholar and art collector who was Blunt’s mentor at Trinity. Gow, who had ...”

“... was the experience of many young persons in the years following her death; and such still seems to be the experience of young readers who discover her today. But there is something wrong, very wrong, somewhere: there is contradiction at the heart of it all. Her Diary shows what it is. For its appeal is quite different; to a different audience, a different ...”

“... remains a spindly figure with a birdlike face. I can’t warm to him, but I know him well enough by now to hazard the question that has been preying on my mind for a while: ‘Why is it always you, the vice-president, whom I meet when I have dealings with the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and not Alexis Kanyarengwe?’ Kanyarengwe was the movement’s ...”

“... In trying to think what Marx would have made of the world today, we have to begin by stressing that he was not an empiricist. He didn’t think that you could gain access to the truth by gleaning bits of data from experience, ‘data points’ as scientists call them, and then assembling a picture of reality from the fragments you’ve accumulated ...”

“... funny, but what really struck me was that every woman I knew who had seen it was mesmerised not by the ‘issues’ but by Huppert, and not just for her acting – she’s always good – but for what she wore: ‘the clothes’, women said to one another, were ‘amazing’. Yet when you look at them in stills they ...”

“... sons from Berlin to London in September 1933 when Lucian was almost 11. She was soon followed by her husband, Ernst, an architect and the youngest son of Sigmund Freud. Over the next five or six years, more members of the family, including Sigmund himself, came to England, where their papers were organised by Marie ...”

“... Both in art and in our general ideas about the passage of human life there is assumed to be a general abiding timeliness. We assume that the essential health of a human life has a great deal to do with its correspondence to its time – the fitting together of the two – and is therefore defined by its appropriateness or timeliness ...”

“... of Ayn Rand, your search engine will probably direct you first to aynrand.org, a website run by the Ayn Rand Institute in California. The ARI was founded in 1985, three years after Rand’s death, by Leonard Peikoff, her friend and heir. It runs a newsletter called Impact and, via the Objectivist Academic ...”

“... of Münster completed the collection of Frege’s unpublished writings, of which he had charge, by obtaining from those, such as Russell and Husserl, whose letters to Frege were included in the collection, the letters Frege had written to them. On 25 March 1945 the US Air Force bombed Münster. I believe that the object was to destroy an important telephone ...”

“... the Golan Heights and the Sinai. Nasrallah was killed under a fusillade of eighty bombs dropped by the Israeli air force on his headquarters in Haret Hreik, in the southern suburbs of Beirut. A few hours earlier, Benjamin Netanyahu had addressed the UN General Assembly, denouncing the organisation as a cesspool of antisemitism and vowing to press on with ...”

“... in the course of Breathless, in the scene where the small-time gangster Michel Poiccard, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, dives into a cinema on the Champs Elysées in order to shake off a wearisome tail. The film which is up on the screen turns out to be Budd Boetticher’s Westbound, one of the Randolph Scott ...”