“... to record the aesthetic’. In his seventies he was still taking up an old worry about his own powers of seeing. In a note ‘inspired’ by Woolf’s posthumous A Writer’s Diary, he laments: ‘The beauties the beauties the things I let go by.’ No one should approach Forster’s diaries, now published in full for the first time, with any expectation ...”

“... and virtually untouchable acquis, and a decreasing connection to public feeling, was expanding its powers at the expense of national parliaments. The truth was that ‘the EU began as an oligarchy, it continues oligarchic, and the oligarchs see no reason to alter their practices or their ambitions. No previous empire I can think of, certainly not that of the ...”

“... damaging yourself.’Suppose a philosopher, in her middle forties, is working at the height of her powers, with The Broken Middle (1992), the book she saw as her greatest achievement, just published. In February 1993, she delivers a triumphant inaugural lecture, ‘Athens and Jerusalem – A Tale of Three Cities’, at the University of Warwick, where she has ...”

“... massacres of 1994: she downplayed the genocidal aspect in favour of ‘the role played by outside powers’, and accused ‘aid agencies’ of ‘building prisons’ instead of bringing in food and medical help. Aid agencies, unsurprisingly, objected; Alex de Waal, an expert on Sudan, did some digging and discovered that Foster is really Fiona Fox. Her ...”

“... Tibbald or Tibbles, inherited a name that just happened to be as innocently embarrassing as, say, Thomas Kitten. The name Theobald/Tibbald was there; Pope didn’t put it there. What is difficult about Pope is not his fantasy but his facts. The poet might have told Mack that no ‘translation’ had taken place, that not he but Nature had made ...”

“... to her husband Henry, owner of Time magazine. ‘Probably both.’ Hearing his plans, Admiral Thomas Hart, commander of the grandly-named US Asiatic Fleet, wrote to his wife: ‘Douglas is, I think, no longer altogether sane ... he may not have been for a long time.’ When Japan attacked the Philippines, four hours after Pearl Harbor, the sceptics were ...”

“... decided to send a delegation to Russia to seek formal recognition. (It was also suggested that Thomas Johnston, leader of the Labour Party, should be one of its members.) The initial proposal had come from de Valera, writing to Griffith from Washington and suggesting that McCartan go to Russia as a delegate from the Dáil. The idea was to obtain ...”

“... is established as a voice – and the commerce between them can begin. Brevity acquired new powers, allied to quickness and lightness. Paul Valéry described Voltaire’s contes as ‘those peerless miracles of rapidity, energy and terrible fantasy … nimble and cruel works, where satire, opera, ballet and ideology are joined in an irresistible ...”

“... But the three officers connected with these documents – Vernon Attwell, John Donaldson and Thomas Style – had signed witness statements in December 1974 stating that the manuscript notes were contemporaneous, and they had repeated this on oath in the trial in 1975. If the rough typed notes were indeed a draft from which the manuscript notes were ...”

“... lies over north Norfolk. Eleven miles to the north of Agnew’s house is Holkham Hall, where Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester, still owns farmland on the scale of his eponymous Georgian ancestor, the agricultural reformer Coke of Norfolk. Last year the Holkham Farming Company received £183,000 in subsidies; another Holkham enterprise, Holkham Nature ...”

“... has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbours.’ If backing the underdog were a compelling motive, the United States would be supporting Israel’s opponents. That Israel is a fellow democracy surrounded by hostile dictatorships cannot account for the current level of ...”

“... company’s factory seven time zones away in Vietnam – had been intense to the point of danger. Thomas Maguire was sacked in 2018 for refusing to follow an order. He was told to use a heavy-duty forklift called a reach stacker to move a tower section. The section, a steel cylinder weighing about a hundred tonnes, lay on its side, a temporary ring attached ...”

“... the law of liberty, from the logic of popular sovereignty. Assemblies had to be stripped of their powers of general meddling, in order to secure the limited government – based on the rigour of law, not the licence of consent – which was the only guarantee of freedom. The correct formula, Hayek explained, was demarchy without democracy. Two years after the ...”

“... which, indeed, seems advancing towards us with a frightful, slow, unswerving consistency,’ Thomas Carlyle wrote as the disease entered Britain through Sunderland. Eventually it killed 52,000 in Britain alone. ‘Our other plagues were home-bred, and part of ourselves,’ an anonymous English doctor wrote:We had a habit of looking on them with a fatal ...”

“... you know why it’s called the Black Dwarf?’ ‘No.’ He went on: ‘It was a paper created by Thomas Wooler, a very radical journalist, for the miners really: miners were stunted after generations of working in these mines, and when they came out of the mines in the evening their faces were covered with soot. So Tom Wooler decided to call the paper the ...”