“... tried to persuade him to temper his unhealthy lifestyle, they used to point out how awful it would be if Henry Kissinger outlived him. Hitchens spent years pursuing Kissinger in print – and sometimes in person – for his assorted war crimes. He wanted to see him prosecuted at The Hague. Failing that, wouldn’t it ...”

“... What next for the literary masterpiece, one wonders. Birthday cards? A retirement gong?Daunted by the hullabaloo, I was relieved to come across the wispy voice of Leonard Woolf, asked in an interview broadcast by the BBC on 23 May 1964 to define his wife’s ‘genius’ or ‘special attributes’. ‘Normally,’ he ...”

“... The volunteers agreed to have sex with these men, to infiltrate their social networks, and by that means to find out as much as possible about the extent and organisation of male homosexual activity in Newport. The decoys soon discovered that the Army and Navy YMCA was the most popular hangout for ‘fairies’, ...”

“... report on the Trump presidency had better begin with a disclaimer. Anything one says is sure to be displaced by some entirely unexpected thing the president does between writing and publication. This has happened once already, with the Putin-Trump press briefing in Helsinki and the strange spectacle it afforded: the ...”

“... makes the rest of the world uncomfortable, and Madison’s ideas can often seem too American to be true (in contrast to Rousseau, whose ideas can often seem too true to be Swiss). The other, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès from Provence, is not mistrusted outside his native France so much as ignored. Even in France he is more of ...”

“... who, as Boris Johnson gleefully pointed out when the Games had finished, were scattered and routed by the rip-roaring success of London 2012. I assumed something would go wrong; everything went right. I thought people would complain about the cost; no one seems to have begrudged a penny. It was a triumph: I accept that now. But in one respect I still refuse to ...”

“... a Jew.’A good deal of indoctrination must have gone into that. Did it come from reiteration by family that I was one of the chosen people? Did it come from explanation by nannies that they went to church on Sundays because they were Christians while we went to synagogue on Saturdays because we were Jews? I had always ...”

“... inconsiderable. But the 1974 anthology, Zur Philosophie der Musik, was excused from answering it by the personal significance it manifestly had and by the historical one that the Busoni volume enhanced. Moreover it was on every side supported by the Complete Edition and its attendant ...”

“... The final insult came when a New York journalist started a rumour that Maris’s record would not be allowed to stand, because in 1961 the baseball season had been expanded from 154 to 162 games, meaning Maris had had an extra eight games to get past Ruth. Word got out that Maris’s 61 would be followed in the record books ...”

“... bomb – were to become an almost public constituent of his writing life. His criticism is marked by the same mixture of yearning and disappointed hopes. Agee’s special province as a movie reviewer was the perception of purpose – the honourable failure is a frequent subject with him, more congenial than the rare masterwork or the latest specimen of ...”

“... slavery is different from one that abolishes it; a democracy that denies the vote to women can’t be compared to one that grants it; a democracy of 13 states is nothing like one with fifty. Despite these changes, it’s the features that have remained constant which stand out. The most celebrated is the constitution, a uniquely durable – or to put it ...”

“... desert, violet and dun, to the biblical meadows, the pretty colours and the plenty that will be California. The art direction of that great trek westwards was perfect – art direction usually is. And now here comes Joan Didion, a little bit like the doomsayer on the wagon train (Walter Brennan, with teeth), but too arresting to ...”

“... Brown begins his story in medias res. Given his rollercoaster time in Downing Street, punctuated by the gut-wrenching drama of the financial crisis, there should have been plenty of arresting moments to choose from. Some, though, are already taken. Alistair Darling, for instance, starts Back from the Brink, his 2011 account of what it was like being ...”

“... of living up to his good intentions: Putting Iraq to rights, in Mr Blair’s view, should be the whole world’s business. The more that all nations make common cause to do this, the better. The less this happens, the more vital it is to balance any absence of common cause with a sense of equitable and humanitarian initiatives – on the Middle East ...”

“... images are duly laid out for public consumption on the nightly news, but the public is jaded by too many images of a suffering world. Then some bright spark in one of the better-funded NGOs offers individuals the chance to ‘adopt’ particular children or families in the refugee camps, and to keep an eye on their progress through a direct video-link to ...”