“... involving Sefton and the Isle of Wight, and the High Court has told local councils what cuts they may or may not make. Do you agree with Mr Sumption?’ ‘I am very sympathetic with Mr Sumption and the views he has expressed,’ Lord Judge said. He then explained that judges have to enforce the law, that local authorities ...”

“... response to the death of tonality, and to the death of ‘expressiveness’ it enacted. This may be my ignorance of music – I’m easily overpowered. With Richter there can be no such certainty. I cannot imagine a viewer emerging from the rooms at Tate Modern and being sure that Richter’s endless hovering around the fact of the photograph – his ...”

“... it might be a dictatorship, it was an enlightened and progressive one. As for Egypt, Anthony Eden may have described Nasser as ‘that Hitler on the Nile’, but after the 1978 Camp David Accords the country became a pillar of American interests in the Middle East and – by its withdrawal from the Arab-Israeli conflict – an unwitting enabler of the ...”

“... from elsewhere: before 1979 it paid millions to the US for fuel that was never delivered. In May 2010 Iran signed a deal with Turkey, mediated by Brazil, to send a portion of its low-enriched uranium stockpile abroad in exchange for 120kg of highly enriched nuclear fuel rods for the Tehran reactor. The deal ultimately collapsed, however, and talks in ...”

“... Tóibín tackles one of his country’s defining narratives (and one whose contemporary resonance may soon be sharpened by the current economic crisis): the long and difficult story of Irish emigration. For much of the history of the Irish state, emigration was a national embarrassment, something it was difficult to talk about. This was equally ...”

“... No shortage, no problems to plan for. Powell points out that climate change is not something that may happen to the American West or that is now happening only in the Arctic. It is here, now. And at the end of Dead Pool he describes what a post-climate-change South-West might look like – the book’s title, incidentally, is the term used to describe a ...”

“... than nothing. Death equals beginning to smell bad. Life – so culture knows unconsciously – may not have an opposite at all, just an ending. The very category Death – the making of nothing into something: a terrain, a concept, an object of knowledge, maybe even a person – is one of the species’ consolations. This is a materialist view. I want to ...”

“... which reduce us to an oppressed half-life from which we break out at our peril. Childhood may be relatively happy – it offers, as the young narrator Marcus tells us in Indignation, ‘unimperilled, unchanging days when everybody felt safe and settled in his place’ – but as soon as the sex instinct kicks in, parental protectiveness turns into ...”

“... writes, ‘he would wake abruptly from the recurrent nightmare that he had killed her’. ‘May my life’s work make good for my misdeed,’ he wrote in his late forties. The father made the son expose the mother’s desire: Reich devoted his professional life to exposing everyone’s desire, but in Freud’s name. When he was 17 his father, having ...”

“... hardly the Berlitz method, but a blow to the head can work wonders.’ It seems that the brain may remap itself in peculiar ways, altering the neural circuitry laid down in the womb. Sometimes a slight error is made in the remapping. The sensation Nelson had that his non-existent fingers were digging into his non-existent palm led him to believe in the ...”

“... change’. ‘I hope Syrian President Bashar Assad will consider reforms, otherwise he may say to himself: “I could be the second target,”’ Richard Perle told the Arabic newspaper Asharq al-Awsat in February 2003. As Washington sought to isolate Damascus, some Arab powers – especially Saudi Arabia and Egypt – became hostile to ...”

“... on the reasonable assumption that, as the head of Military Intelligence in the SIS put it, ‘We may well be fighting the USSR in a year.’ James, though, was outraged that we were not doing everything we could to help our ally. ‘I never felt that I was acting for the CP,’ he told me, ‘as indeed I was not. It was to help the war effort.’ He was in ...”

“... eldest child and favourite daughter of Queen Victoria, knew her first-born too well. On 2 May 1888, she secretly sent a chest containing two volumes of her husband’s diaries as well as several important documents to Windsor and asked her mother to place it with three chests her husband had deposited there the year before. William II rejected ...”

“... all of whom have been well served in recent biographies, Cobb was never a college head, and this may go some way to explaining his subsequent eclipse. It was a role for which he was epically unsuited, given his (very un-French) disdain for administration, his indiscretion and his legendary thirst. Heald’s introductory aside – ‘he liked a ...”

“... is also true that I am not competent to restore it./Neither is there candour, and here I may be of some use.’ When you look at her earlier collections, especially the very candid Ararat (1990), it’s tempting to assume the worst of her childhood: we find murdered children, drowned children, ghostly infant sisters, children starved (almost ...”