“... Grey’s miscalculations about Reform in the 1790s turned out well in the long run. The same may be true of the 1980s. The young aspirants who have pinned their hopes to the SLD and electoral reform may include the Charles Grey of a great enactment in 2032. According to the polls, nearly half of Britain’s electors ...”

“... conveys the relish unmistakably; and though it’s what gives the stanza its poetic energy, we may surely find it sinister. For we know from elsewhere that ‘hatred engendered by religious strife’ was by no means foreign to Milton’s temperament. Is it foreign to Christopher Hill’s? I’d say it is, for his tone in this collection of essays is, for ...”

“... to say things to. To sit nearer the window, in patches of silence, wondering what, if anything, may still be done to help. Why, it is even possible to smile at each other briefly; while music plays, and life pretends to be ordinary. 5. I remember her singing this very song, decades ago. One of the reasons, of course, why I bought her this tape. How happy ...”

“... embraced a principle which he did not subsequently abandon,’ but also to add that his works ‘may always be advantageously referred to as furnishing materials for speculation’. His readiness to change his mind was, in his lifetime, his weakness and is in retrospect his strength. It is the justification of a major biography. The initial Essay on ...”

“... done, the author explains lucidly and in considerable detail the operation of what to modern eyes may seem an essentially unacceptable system. Since the 19th century ushered in a new concept of public morality, many historians have found little to praise in the bribery and corruption of the Jacobean Court. And amongst the system’s beneficiaries few cut a ...”

“... indulgent notion of what a wayward 11-year-old is like, but they are wrong. Over the years William may have been surrounded by some wildly caricatured types, but he himself has remained a recognisable robust figure of flesh and blood, especially blood. If, as Orwell says, Billy Bunter is a first-class comic character, then how much more so is William. His ...”

“... law is what the Supreme Court says it is has both personal and constitutional ramifications which may take a long time to play out. More immediately, the legislation sponsored by Hilary Benn requiring the prime minister to ask the EU for an extension to Article 50 in the absence of an exit agreement before Halloween contains no enforcement mechanism. One ...”

“... created more of the same. The distances these stones travelled were huge: pebbles on the beach may originally have been pieces of a rock hundreds or even thousands of miles away (these are known as erratics). In a photograph taken in the early 1970s on Dunwich beach, I am standing on a large lump of masonry that has tumbled down from the top of the ...”

“... We may​ think all biopics are biofantasies, in which case the opening title card of Adam McKay’s new film Vice will have us laughing already. After all, he is the former Saturday Night Live writer who made The Big Short, a very funny movie about the 2008 financial crisis. The card says: ‘The following is a true story ...”

“... In​ the second week of May, a man climbed up a ladder and unscrewed a street sign on Moskovsky Prospekt, the longest street in Kharkiv. To cheers and whoops, his co-conspirator dumped the faded blue sign in a bin, and they pasted a replacement onto the chipboard covering a shattered window. The new sign read ‘G ...”

“... In February, the price of coated papers was up 78 per cent from last year. The manufacturers may have wanted higher prices, but dramatic hikes are bad for the industry’s stability as well as for buyers. Other industries are affected too. Supplies of label substrate – the shiny material from which you peel labels – are depleting, which could affect ...”

“... The past is in front of you: what happened there, or some of it, can be seen. Events on one strand may affect the others, and not in a linear way but in a direct one. Future and past generations are fully alive in Andean time, living on in their times as equally and immediately as you do in yours. Things and places can move between streams, or can be present ...”

“... likely to make successful prosecution a cinch; Maryland, where the death penalty was suspended in May, couldn’t compete. But in any case, there’s a strong sense that it’s all over bar the date of execution. Very possibly that’s all people are interested in. The support of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence did not make much difference to ...”

“... it was Winifred whose paintings sold. In the exhibition at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge (until 11 May, after which it moves to Dulwich Picture Gallery), Winifred and Ben’s paintings from the ten years in which they lived together are hung side by side. Ben’s still lifes are of empty vessels: jugs, bowls and pots standing together, in formal, Morandi-like ...”

“... and elsewhere, today and for ever.’ The film cuts to Mitterrand, who has risen to respond. If he may be permitted to speak from the heights of his experience, he says, Sankara talks with the fine bravery of youth, but his tongue is too sharp and he goes too far. François places an avuncular hand on Thomas’s shoulder. Sankara laughs but doesn’t look ...”