“... We have defied the laws of arithmetic,’ declared a buoyant David Steel after he had heard the result of the Croydon, North-West by-election, ‘One plus one really does equal three.’ It is now apparent that the public opinion polls were consistently correct in showing that, while support for the Liberal Party as such remained of a traditionally modest order and support for the Social Democrats alone was a similar or even smaller percentage, backing for the two-party alliance as a third force in British politics was a wholly different matter, and promised the chance of a complete breakthrough under the existing electoral system ...”

“... states of affairs currently preoccupying and bedevilling the unhappy place. However, after reading David Lamb’s The Africans these responses should be leavened with another one – despair. For this comprehensive and valuable survey of the status quo in sub-Saharan Africa is such a depressing catalogue of human iniquity that the reader experiences the same ...”

“... And shall Trelawny die? It seems not, since David Crane’s book is the fourth life of him to have been published in the last sixty years. Yet it is an odd sort of immortality which leaves a man with someone else’s name in the title of his biography. It was Joseph Severn, the amiable artist whose kindness sweetened Keats’s last months, who referred to Trelawny as ‘Lord Byron’s jackal ...”

“... eternal return and amor fati is different from the question of whether the ideas can all be held without incoherence. A character like Faust suggests to me that the postulated philosopher would be a better ‘literary’ character if this web of beliefs turned out to be fatally flawed. Since Nehamas argues that the ideas really do form a coherent ...”

“... of Edinburgh, Haile Selassie, Spiro Agnew and Imelda Marcos, among many others – his state was held up as a model of managed development. Then, during 1978, it fell apart. In late 1977 the eldest son of the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, the loudest and most fearless of the shah’s critics, died of a heart attack. The ayatollah’s supporters blamed the shah ...”

“... part in a rather more splendid version of it in Notre-Dame. Semmel has also uncovered the banquet held in Yarmouth to celebrate Napoleon’s defeat, which featured a table three-quarters of a mile long groaning under the iconic English dishes of roast beef and plum pudding, accompanied by strong beer. While the townspeople gobbled and guzzled, an effigy of ...”

“... in, or wanting to come in.’ There’s quite a lot of Davis herself, we might guess, in the view held by the comically disgruntled narrator of ‘Not Interested’: ‘These days, I prefer books that contain something real, or something the author at least believed to be real. I don’t want to be bored by someone else’s imagination.’Concise and truthful ...”

“... patriarch you’d unluckily got yourself the wrong side of, and quite another to find that men you held in veneration, men who had taken the trouble to interrogate you extensively about your personal and professional affairs, men who furthermore did not hesitate to ask you for advice and support when it suited them, could still treat you like an idiot or a ...”

“... Those lawyers turned gratefully to decisions made by the European Court of Human Rights which held that certain Abu Ghraib-like procedures employed by the British in Northern Ireland were not extreme enough to be called torture; the Israeli Supreme Court was similarly complacent when it decided that behaviour could be ‘cruel and inhuman’ without ...”

“... of Luxembourg, the leading candidate of the Christian Democrats. ‘Presidential debates’ were held in French, English and German (all of which both Juncker and Schulz speak fluently). Juncker came across as exactly what he is: not ‘the most dangerous man in Europe’, as the Sun has it, but a veteran of EU consensus politics who, as head of the ...”

“... ten years as an instrument of the Whig persuasion, and was to run on as such into a future that held the Parliamentary triumph of 1832, when the Reform Bill was passed, with Cockburn and Jeffrey responsible for the consequential Scottish measures. The letter plays out a comedy of the literary life. Reviewing is spoken of as a peculiar art – it was also a ...”

“... of the church, the rise of intolerance, the spirit of the Crusades – blame it on Constantine. David Potter punctures this inflated image. This doesn’t mean he cuts Constantine down to size: far from it. Potter has done something far more difficult. He has examined, with gusto and an unrivalled mastery of detail, the aspects of Constantine neglected by ...”

“... had died – we pushed through a turnstile, removed our belts, passed through a metal detector and held our IDs up against the thick bulletproof glass for a soldier to inspect. On the other side, Amro, a young Danish woman and I walked down Shuhada Street, which was as ghostly and calm as ever, the shops sealed shut by military order more than a decade ...”

“... but does one suffer death, or is it just life’s ultimate experience?) Howard’s memorial was held at the Savile Club in Mayfair and concluded with the airing of an interview she did on the Today programme. There were appreciations and reflections by Hilary Mantel and Martin Amis (read by other friends) but her order of service concludes with the ...”

“... translators are forced to rephrase the passage, to suggest an internal condition. For example, David Grene, whose translation is used in most American universities: ‘My body, too, has felt this thrill of pain.’ After reading Ruth Padel, one would understand, even if one did not know a word of Greek, that the women of Troezen were describing Phaedra’s ...”