“... never get it,’ our teacher had said a few weeks previously). I was there again in May 2007 when Tony Blair announced he was stepping down as prime minister and leader of the Labour Party. Both times we watched political history live on TV. I don’t recall anything about Cameron’s acceptance speech (telling), but I’ve never forgotten ...”

“... easier now that I’m in southern Spain, where I snorkel regularly at my local beach. From mid-May to mid-October the temperatures are fine. For the rest of the year I only do the odd cold plunge into the sea and swim for a few minutes at most. This year I decided to try to snorkel all year round and I keep going for anything from five to twenty ...”

“... bourses, took a hit, and the spread between German and Italian bonds grew by a few points. It may yet turn out that a more significant date than 4 March 2018 will be 31 October 2019, when Italy’s most powerful man, Mario Draghi, steps down as president of the European Central Bank. In July 2012, Draghi said the ECB would do ‘whatever it takes’ to ...”

“... California, a surfer’s paradise that doubles as a nursery for juvenile great whites, which may be immature, but are nonetheless huge and lethal predators. (Indeed, their immaturity is part of the issue: they’re deeply curious, and don’t know yet that there is better prey than human beings.) I also sometimes surf in Northern California, at a reef ...”

“... wines, or bad wines mixed with white of egg, honey and other sweetening matter.’ Honey and egg may have vanished from the adulteration of wine, but the expertise required of a wine expert is not now so different. Wine adulteration has never completely disappeared. Eleven years after the Widow Bourne opened her shop on St James’s Street, Addison wrote in ...”

“... line to the future’. This is a reasonably faithful summary of just thirty pages of the book. It may sound frantic, but that’s not the way it felt to me. Lopez packs his pages like the hold of a cargo plane, with everything strapped down, aisles between, and labelled. The argument is sometimes fleeting, and Horizon is a less focused book than Arctic ...”

“... the only time they get to visit the seaside, even though their homes in the Occupied Territories may be no more than twenty or thirty kilometres away. There are draconian restrictions on the movement of Palestinians living in the West Bank (the residents of Gaza live in an open-air prison of their own). Yet every year, during Eid al-Fitr at the end of ...”

“... an education is admirable, her belief in its transformative power seems naive. Learning English may seem like a good investment but the cost is isolation from her Shona-speaking family. And books may be a source of enlightenment but not when her O-level syllabus is so narrowly focused. It’s both comic and tragic that ...”

“... allow for a universe which works in ways that are obscure and unfair. But the possibility that man may try to make himself immune to God is allowed into the novels with equal potency. One of his early novels, In the Winter Dark (1988), dwells chillingly on what happens when it is too late to atone. A straightforward Christian answer rarely gets a free run in ...”

“... How excessive was the excess of the past? Scott Fitzgerald may have decided that the very rich are different from you and me, but they live in our own time; so we can begin to comprehend their wealth, even when spent on private jets, triplex penthouses or million-dollar birthday parties. The scales for measuring wealth in the past seem less certain, when the contemporary value of a pound or louis or scudo is difficult to fix except in terms of relatively abstract comparisons ...”

“... would like to have. Each of the women closest to him – L, his friend and the hotel cook; May, his daughter-in-law and dogsbody; Heed, his widow; Christine, his granddaughter – has her own version of the man, and fights to claim him as her own. But we see him chiefly through the eyes of Heed and Christine, who live as enemies in his house. A ...”

“... What can be done with a people that produces 246 different cheeses? General De Gaulle’s remark may be apocryphal – France has far more than 246 cheeses – but it captures a central dilemma in French history. How could such a diverse collection of peoples be forged into a single nation? The question remains pertinent ...”

“... contain speculations about the future. They include a vision of self-reproducing automata, which may alter the appearance of deserts, and ultimately perhaps of the solar system. He points out that the nature of such developments is critically dependent on time-scale, on whether a generation of these automata is comparable to a human generation, or as short ...”

“... maintain unity within their industry, can exercise enormous clout, and it seems to me that some may for a while get away with it. But as depression deepens, an atmosphere of anxiety will dampen the climate of all negotiations. This will prove an extremely difficult situation, but it won’t go away, however hard we look in the opposite direction. The longer ...”

“... strike the unclean forces, an enchanted sword to cleave and disperse them. Grant, O Lord, that I may not break as I strike! Let me not fall from Thy hand!’ (1973). Alexander Solzhenitsyn subtitles his book ‘Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union’, and we feel the secondary, invisible inverted commas he claps around ...”