“... over several years. For instance, I was almost sure I would tackle the distinguished art critic John Russell’s Paris (1960), ‘with photographs by Brassaï’, but never got past the pictures. I had slightly less confidence about Maxime Du Camp’s six-volume Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle ...”

“... after the death of the poet Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (another Nobel laureate) in 1910; and clearly took it seriously. It gave him an opportunity to influence Norwegian society. So all those novels about the flight from the countryside and the corruption brought about by city life and the English were more than explorations of the psyche: they were intended as ...”

“... the idea of universal human rights with the greatest vigour in the 1940s. But when New Labour took power in 1997, with its talk of human rights and ethical foreign policy, its future role as a quasi-colonial power was somehow not anticipated. Equally unanticipated was the long reach of Article 3, with its prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading ...”

“... Last Easter, my family and I took a holiday house in the West Highlands. The windows of the cottage looked onto a salt marsh, and beyond that, to the fast-moving waters of the Kyles of Lochalsh. Across the waters rose the hills of southern Skye, still dusted with snow. Nearby stood the unloved stone ruin of a barracks built to house government troops engaged on the Highland-suppressing project that followed Culloden ...”

“... guests, perfecting a culture of easy informality between the sexes. Laura – and later Margot – took something of the Glen’s bracing air and surprising intimacy to London society when they were triumphantly launched there in the early 1880s: Mary Elcho, Laura’s best friend and a prominent Soul, remembered ‘a plunge, a splash as of a bright pebble ...”

“... later. In his youth, Naipaul recounts, he believed that ‘things ran their course; elections took place, and the United States and Great Britain continued much as they had done.’ This otherwise incomprehensible indifference to current events is seen by him in 2007 as possessing one major virtue: ‘When I began to travel I saw places fresh.’ But has ...”

“... These three novels came out in 1907, 1908 and 1909 with the firm of Bruno Cassirer (who later took on Wolfgang Koeppen). They represent Walser probably at the zenith of what it seems a mistake to call a career in anything but the most literal (or punning) sense. Walser was living in Berlin, sometimes in the house of his brother Karl, a famous and ...”

“... but no supervisor came to negotiate with them. Instead, guards opened fire. Demonstrators then took to the streets of Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, where they targeted Chinese-owned businesses and held a rally outside the Chinese Embassy. Hu had planned to visit Zambia’s copper-producing region, where he was to lay the cornerstone of a new stadium financed ...”

“... The Salsette, a P&O steamship of 6000 tons, was torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat on 20 July 1917. John Liddiard, a British diver forever in search of a new discovery, says that the Salsette is ‘the Mecca of South Coast wreck-diving. Ask any Weymouth skipper and it seems that just about every charter group wants to dive this one.’ Robert Louis ...”

“... community needed to be ‘100 per cent happy’ with the content, but in the same message to John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, he made clear that ‘the judgment as to whether a single person should be appointed to write the final version’ had yet to be made.20 On his best behaviour, Scarlett made a final seizure of control ...”

“... wiretap of Trump. Again, the point was technically true. But the apparent honesty of the assurance took advantage of a careless anachronism in Trump’s language: wiretaps ordered on individuals belong to the espionage of fifty years ago. Obama, of course, didn’t order a wiretap of Trump by name, but the Trump campaign, including Trump Tower facilities, was ...”

“... and that to encourage urination – and hence to lessen the danger of kidney stones – one took a spoonful of ‘ginger jam’ before dinner. Some of the advice is common sense – what would today come under the rubric of ‘healthy lifestyle’ – though a ‘prayer to stop the flow of blood’ might prove unhelpful in an emergency. There is ...”

“... Act of 1832 and the third of 1884, British Liberal governments sought to extend state power, but took care to reassure property-owners that the aim was not to undermine them but to strengthen social stability, through national policing and prison reform, state education and increased powers over poor relief and drunkenness.Many books have tried to get to ...”

“... by the Tory life peer Dido Harding, herself a former McKinsey consultant. Harding’s husband, John Penrose, another former McKinsey consultant and a Tory MP, was at the time the ‘anti-corruption champion’ at the Home Office. During the pandemic, he hit the headlines for trying to absolve Owen Paterson, a fellow Tory MP, who had improperly lobbied on ...”

“... the interests and weaknesses of others. In Lucina’s Rape, Rochester’s adaptation of John Fletcher’s tragedy Valentinian (c.1610-14), Marcellina, a lady in waiting, shows her worldliness by parroting typical male arguments against women’s chastity: ‘This Honour is the veriest Mountebanke … what a cheate must that bee/Which robbs our lives ...”