“... would produce a comprehensive report of its visit for the First Zionist Congress which was to be held in Basel in August that year. Bentwich was well-to-do, Western European and religious. Herzl and most early Zionists were chiefly interested in helping the impoverished and persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe, but Bentwich was more worried about the number of ...”

“... is not kind. After she became famous, Sontag would compare herself to Dorothea in Middlemarch, held back by Casaubon. At the time, she wrote: ‘I have been cast in the role of husband killer à la Dorothea Brooke Casaubon.’ As the diaries proceed, Sontag and Rieff turn up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they dine with his new colleagues from ...”

“... Chekhov’s irony is often savage, modern irony is often merely all-nullifying. It says much for David Bezmozgis’s considerable talents that his apparently skinny, crafty, ironic stories, narrated entirely in the first person in simple, unmetaphorical prose, and fond of abrupt closures, should seem to dip so obviously into the common pool and yet avoid, on ...”

“... that draw attention to himself – he actually seems to relish it. The reason he is currently held in such opprobrium is that his Real Madrid side lost to Barcelona after adopting astonishingly negative tactics in their Champions League semi-final. It was hideous to watch. But it said two things about Mourinho: first, he wasn’t frightened of risking a ...”

“... and delay at the other end. Kurosawa almost literally suspends Sato in the booth, in a long shot held for 25 seconds, while the hotel manager flirts clumsily with the receptionist in the foreground. The thief escapes. As Sato leaves the booth in pursuit, the receiver dangles. He is shot down outside. Kurosawa, unlike Wyler, does not provide an intermediary ...”

“... of a stick, leaning on his son’s arm. Under the trousers, of course, were the iron braces that held his legs erect but, to political observers in 1928, FDR no longer seemed crippled, merely ‘lame’. It was a brilliant piece of spin, but also evidence of genuine improvement – testimony to years of relentless physical exercise. He seems to have been ...”

“... the 18 December meeting of the 1922 Committee Eden was forced to admit that he no longer ‘held in his head’ the details of Britain’s treaty obligations in the Middle East, at which point even his most loyal supporters lost confidence in his ability to carry on). In January, he resigned on the grounds of ill health, allowing his chancellor to ...”

“... swiftly, with the minimum of bureaucracy – a security official in a British port can use a hand-held device to get information that a person entering the UK is of interest to the authorities in a member state – but subject to proper legal process. May said her judgment, as home secretary, was that ‘remaining a member of the European Union means we will ...”

“... disasters, Benedict Cumberbatch as Smiley’s diligent gofer, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, David Dencik, Ciarán Hinds as high-ups in British intelligence, all candidates for the ultimately declared position of mole – and the director’s elegant hand is everywhere. Tomas Alfredson is best known for his bleak vampire movie Let the Right One In, and ...”

“... The most enthusiastic moment came when David Cameron promised to end poverty and pronounced the Tories the real party of the poor. The Conservatives have, of course, always thought themselves the real party of the poor but this time the claim was accompanied by some genuine rhetoric about inequality which they may come to regret ...”

“... over his life and over his conduct as a leader of the Revolution, and what is soon evident about David Lawday’s spirited and highly readable biography is that he stands Danton in a flattering light and pays insufficient attention to movements in the shadows. ‘The Gentle Giant of Terror’, the subtitle calls him: which suggests, along with revolutionary ...”

“... of sin. Is this ‘artful whiteface mockery of pious racists’? In his new biography of Wheatley, David Waldstreicher encourages us to think so, and to read the lines in a ‘mocking or satirical instead of a beseeching voice’, so that we can hear Wheatley ‘become the organic intellectual of the enslaved’.The poem shows Wheatley working within narrow ...”

“... of freeing the hostages and punishing their captors only by sacking the place where they had been held. The ‘higher principles of humanity’ he sought to uphold were not what we would now call the higher principles of humanitarianism. Rather, they were the principles of biblical justice, the idea that wrongdoers would be pursued, no matter how far ...”

“... that one way to tackle the climate emergency was to have fewer children. That view is still widely held, especially among well-meaning progressives. Big families look greedy and selfish. Small families look sustainable. And maybe no children is best of all. Don’t reproduce and don’t eat meat were twin mantras for anyone who wanted to reduce their carbon ...”

“... 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 in American political life. On television and in his syndicated newspaper column, he fired back at the liberal mandarins, in between Côte-Rôtie-fuelled lunches ...”