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“... is unusual, there is nothing novel about a member of the Bar being appointed directly to the UK’s highest court. When the highest court was the appellate committee of the House of Lords, appointments to it were occasionally made in this way, sometimes to good effect. Among the last, now more than half a century ago, were James Reid QC, a Scottish Tory MP ...”

“... convinced that they are members of the tribe. Their confusion may issue from Silicon Valley’s own favourite stories about itself. These days in TED talks and tech-world conversation, commerce is described as art and as revolution and huge corporations are portrayed as agents of the counterculture. That may actually have been the case, briefly, in the ...”

“... The supply of stories has perhaps been the American West’s only reliable bounty. The difficult thing has been finding people to notice them, let alone tell them well. The Indian wars, still unfinished as tribes continue to struggle for rights, territory and cultural survival; the resource rushes, the Gold Rush in particular, which turned San Francisco into a cosmopolitan city standing alone in the wilderness; the once astonishingly abundant salmon runs that sustained soil and trees, as well as birds, bears and humans; the timber wars; the rangeland wars; the radical labour and environmental movements; the attitudes people adopted towards a harsh, unfamiliar, often sublime landscape; the evolution of European cultures in a non-European terrain and the arrival of Asian and Latin American immigrants to shape a hybrid culture: all these have had their occasional historians, though most Americans were raised to believe that history happened somewhere else ...”

“... During the break-up with Kimberly Quinn that precipitated his break-up with the Home Office, David Blunkett is reported to have warned her: ‘The law is on my side. I know because I made the law.’ It doesn’t quite have the melodramatic chill of Judge Dredd’s ‘I am the law,’ but it comes close. And it’s easy to imagine Blunkett saying it, for it nicely sums up the tragically self-important view he took of himself, and of the executive branch of government, during his time in office ...”

“... things, the phone went. It was Jason Jenson, known to the police as Wet-Dog, his old friend from Brown, former drug-pusher, cat-burglar, mail fraudster and insurance scam artist, one-time inmate of Lorton penitentiary, now a computer whizz kid with EkaSystems Inc, and earning at least half a million a year . . . Alas, much of Zadie Smith’...”

“... road signs redirecting interested pedestrian traffic.Such juxtapositions, coupled with the area’s extreme social contrasts (multi-million dollar homes next to subsidised housing), set the stage for a contemporary comedy of manners, or its modern analogue: a tale of social media etiquette and IRL intrigue. This is the way Kiley Reid’...”

“... At​ 1 p.m. on 13 July 1936, bidding opened at Sotheby’s on a trunk of Isaac Newton’s notebooks and papers. They had been in the family of the earl of Portsmouth for many years: a previous earl had lent them to the University of Cambridge, where scholars judged them of little scientific importance ...”

“... In​ Peeping Tom (1960), Michael Powell’s brutal parable on the nature of film, a woman confronts a young cameraman, Mark, in his darkroom. Mrs Stephens, who is blind, realises there’s something disturbing about Mark, something linked to his compulsive filmmaking. ‘I’m listening to my instinct now ...”

“... Robert Lowell that brought me to poetry at the age of 19, in 1976. I had borrowed a friend’s omnibus edition of Life Studies and For the Union Dead, and something in me said: ‘This is it!’ I don’t remember the poem I first had that response to, but most likely it was in Part IV of Life Studies, ‘Dunbarton’ or ‘For Sale’, or perhaps ...”

“... would be even worse than no referendum at all: it would open the door to all of Khartoum’s objections, and lead straight to another civil war. But the autonomous government of South Sudan refused to make any concessions: ‘The date [of the referendum] is sacrosanct,’ thundered the president, Salva Kiir Mayardit, a tall, stocky, bearded man almost ...”

“... None of the stories we’ve been told about Meredith Kercher’s death really works. This becomes clear as soon as you start trawling the internet for details: every piece of evidence that came before the court in the trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in 2009, and in their successful appeal in 2011, has been scrutinised ...”

“... 27 December and we break the journey from Yorkshire at Derby in order to go to his funeral. It’s at Bradbourne, a tiny village the taxi-driver has never heard of, and he and his Asian colleagues have a map session before we eventually head off into the Derbyshire hills. The cab is old and draughty, it’s beginning to ...”

“... that you can squeeze even more profit from a production line by outsourcing it to wherever it’s cheapest and breaking it into little bits. But the left in Britain had ‘lost touch with change and the world outside itself’, and was fighting new battles ‘on old ground … on the basis of an old analysis’. ‘It was akin to deploying the cavalry ...”

“... peers, both had sons but were predominantly homosexual – and both kept diaries. When Nicolson’s diaries from 1930 to 1962 were published in three volumes between 1966 and 1968 (the year he died), they were acclaimed for their inside view of political and literary life, as well as their genial urbanity and all-round good-chapmanship. This wasn’t the case ...”

“... of reproach and supermarkets are running out of Argentinian beef. The Agriculture Minister, Nick Brown, is accused of doing too much and doing too little. The questions surrounding the foot and mouth epidemic – where will it all end? how did it all start? – might be understood to accord with anxiety about every aspect of British agriculture today. The ...”