“... the reason oligarchies fail in the end: the public tires of being treated in this way. Democracy may well be bubbling up in Russia in ways that the elite will eventually be unable to control. But until they lose control, there is no doubt about who is in charge. If Britain is turning into an oligarchy, as Ferdinand Mount claims, then it’s nothing like the ...”

“... killers are deviant, while sunlight, death, panic and arthritis are natural. Whatever else they may be, human beings are natural material objects. Normality and convention can be on the side of enlightenment: if being allowed to go on strike isn’t normal, it ought to be; convention dictates that you shouldn’t kick vagrants who ask you for ...”

“... while the BP oil spill, and the subsequent poisoning of Gulf waters with dispersant chemicals, may surpass Katrina in both economic damage and loss of human life. Disaster is part of the character of the city: not just the trauma of past cataclysms, but the fear of what will come next, and how soon. In New Orleans’s first hundred years, the period ...”

“... I am’. He nonetheless believed that ‘the artistic type relative to the systematising type may have a more vigorous innervation of the cortex, rather more volume in the arteries, a richer or more easily oxygenated blood supply.’ In short, much of our nature is determined by our plumbing. There is no one so deceived as the person who believes that he ...”

“... and as Mazower argues: A world in which violations of human rights trump the sanctity of borders may turn out to produce more wars, more massacres and more instability. It may also be less law-abiding. If the history of the past century shows anything, it is that clear legal norms, the empowering of states and the securing ...”

“... of the issues which agitate modern Christians (usually, what people do with their genitals), it may come as a disappointment to learn that although Tametsi took up quite a bit of the council’s time in its last session, the aggro at Trent concerned an utterly different issue, which now sounds as if there really isn’t anything to argue about: whether or ...”

“... of Theidon’s book is that the movement’s ideology is never properly analysed, although it may be that there’s not a lot to analyse. What she says about its provenance is revealing, however. It took root in institutions in Ayacucho, including a secondary school in the ancient Inca administrative centre of Vilcashuamán and San Cristóbal National ...”

“... small attacks, but the local population was, Ludewig suggests, mostly quiet – an attitude that may well have been prompted by the massacre of villagers at Oradour-sur-Glane by Waffen-SS soldiers a few weeks before. Model, on the other hand, had to watch German forces squeeze along the few remaining roads near Falaise, abandoning most of their equipment ...”

“... too, and she made no attempt to disguise it. Her offensive remarks to her friend Maryat Lee may have been facetious, or she may have been playing devil’s advocate, but she was unequivocally disdainful about the integrationists from the North. When James Baldwin toured the southern states in 1957, O’Connor had the ...”

“... with diagrams of blocks needed for an architectural project. Others were on pieces of paper which may have been preserved because they also contained notes, fragments of poems or drafts of letters, for example. Such drawings can be seen in New York, together with an outstanding selection of the small group of highly finished sheets that he made as gifts for a ...”

“... over, and repainted so many times that it looks simultaneously new and old.’ The anonymous buyer may have sought out a trophy, but in critical terms, he’d bought a lemon. What was notable was the painting’s trajectory through the museums, storage facilities and offshore trusts that facilitate the machinations at the upper end of the art market before it ...”

“... 2008-9 talked about as if it were a more modest version of the Great Depression of the 1930s. That may be true, looking back, but at the time the crisis of 2008-9 had the potential to be far worse. ‘Never before,’ as Tooze writes, ‘not even in the 1930s, had such a large and interconnected system come so close to total implosion.’ Ben ...”

“... parvenu-like braggart with power, and the vain self-reflection in the feeling of power’. Johnson may be in it for the posh banquets and Churchillian photos, but the consequences are far, far weightier. It is because he is so uninterested in consequences that he has delegated so much power to his chief strategist. Dominic Cummings has become an object of ...”

“... attractive oboe-playing husband and four attractive kids. (While we’re talking about dreams, you may feel that anyone being able to divine the identity of everyone they see is closer to a nightmare – but it’s only because it’s a nightmare and therefore illegal in most countries that it doesn’t happen already. In Russia anyone can use Yandex’s ...”

“... and neither have authoritarian leaders. When Bill Gates suggested that large public gatherings may be wiped out for the foreseeable future, Viktor Orbán, Binyamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi must have been smiling. ‘We heard the sirens of the Palestinian security forces wailing away,’ a friend in Ramallah wrote to me, ‘and I thought they must be ...”