“... Here are the nominees for the greatest bad argument in political theory. They are: Thomas Hobbes, for Leviathan; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, for The Communist Manifesto; and Plato, for the Republic. Why them? Each of the candidates is hallowed as a Penguin Classic. Each has been foisted on freshman generations in Pol Phil 101 ...”

“... A news​ broadcast from 17 November 1986 shows François Mitterrand and Thomas Sankara at an official dinner in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. Sankara had taken power in a military coup three years before. In the clip he is on his feet delivering a speech and Mitterrand is seated. Sankara has established a radical social programme that aims to modernise his country and lead it out of the feudalism and neo-colonialism which, he believes, has beleaguered it since independence in 1960 ...”

“... is it any wonder that William F. Buckley is still the patron saint of the American right? For more than half a century, he supplied a gloss of coherence and glamour to a movement sorely lacking in both. With his mid-Atlantic drawl and slaloming locutions, he held out the suggestion that being a conservative was a daring and possibly even romantic position ...”

“... us his story as a disembodied narrative voice, but is actually committing words to paper. The more strenuously the novel tries to establish its documentary status, haphazardly arranged, spontaneously written as fast as Matt can type, the more contrived it seems. A story as neatly structured and carefully told as The ...”

“... was rather ‘another possible and perfectly valid way of continuing the series, only with a much more complicated justification’. As Seldom observes, ‘Frank had rediscovered in practice, in a real experiment, what Wittgenstein had already proved theoretically decades earlier: the impossibility of establishing an unambiguous rule . . . You can always ...”

“... whether on behalf of military spending or climate-related infrastructure or public investment more generally. There have been feints in this direction before, from Angela Merkel’s promise to raise defence spending to 2 per cent to Olaf Scholz’s over-touted Zeitenwende, all while the German export-driven wage suppression model remained otherwise ...”

“... 30 April 2020. Donations reached the £1000 target on the 10th. The media seized on the story and more and more money poured in. Moore completed his hundredth lap on the 16th. By the time his JustGiving page closed on the 30th, more than 1.5 million people had donated ...”

“... too much of an optimist, too little of a polemicist to supply the Rousseauian rejoinder: ‘An art more pernicious to men than all the ills it pretends to cure’. But no one who follows Simon Schama’s advice helpfully prescribed in the blurb – ‘take a dose of the book at least once a day and retire early to bed’ – will sleep easy. In fact, two ...”

“... The fourth volume of the Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy opens with a recommendation for Mr Harry Pouncy, ‘Lecturer and Entertainer’, of Dorchester, apparently with a view to his extending his fascinations to a wider public. There follows a note to Desmond MacCarthy suggesting – surely with the firm touch of a provincial or a Victorian survivor – that it would be better if the New Quarterly were called instead the Quarterly Herald or Quarterly Clarion, ‘or some such ...”

“... of Marlowe’s life, particularly of his childhood. Christopher Marlowe – or Marley, in the more common contemporary spelling, the one he used in his only extant signature – was born in the parish of St George, Canterbury, in February 1564. He was the son of John Marlowe, shoemaker, and Katherine née Arthur, a Dover woman. They had nine ...”

“... not her name, which Jem refuses to tell another friend when asked. Then it transpires that she is more likely a therapist than a lover: ‘Do you think it’s cruel that in the hour you have for me there are only fifty minutes? . . . One day I think you should take me home and let me sit at your table, a stranger there, to watch you with your family.’ So ...”

“... The novel perhaps owes to Greek tragedy the notion that the only sure consequence of murder is yet more murder, but the role of the classics is otherwise more decorative than structural, providing a badge of difference for the principal characters, a classy veneer of erudition (a little chipped in places) and some handy plot ...”

“... stained glass, though churches are always proud when they have a Piper window, the latest (and no more pleasing than the rest) glimpsed at Paul Scofield’s memorial service in St Margaret’s, Westminster. For all that, though, the book is immensely readable, drawing together so many strands of the artistic life in the 1930s and 1940s – K. Clark, Ben ...”

“... fringe. Somehow to see them both with these carefully considered haircuts makes the scene even more touching. 6 February. I am reading a history of the Yorkshire Dales by Robert White, one of a series, Landscape through Time, published by English Heritage. During the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing ...”

“... even ‘othering’ – continue to proliferate. At times, all this talk proves more fashionable than productive, turning ‘other’ into little more than a glib synonym for ‘victim’. Even as ‘otherness’ threatens to become all too familiar, however, thinking about the human impulse to distinguish ...”