“... the flat roof which for decades afterwards served as the Politburo’s reviewing stand for May Day and Revolution Day parades in Red Square. On such occasions, Getty writes, ‘the Politburo stood on Lenin’s tomb – literally on his body.’ The idea that traditional (Muscovite) practices resurfaced in the Soviet period has a long genealogy in ...”

“... philosophy’ rather than as a bisexual nymphomaniac who went gaga. He also suggests that they may turn her into ‘a role model for young women today’. A prospect that, on reading them, seems neither likely nor at all desirable. Perhaps the greatest myth about Murdoch that both these books inadvertently explode is the fact often restated by her many ...”

“... and resigned, having failed to square the circle he had helped to draw twenty years earlier. In May 1939, the British government changed its policy again and issued a White Paper setting out plans for the independence of an undivided Palestine, only to back down once more, this time giving way to the Zionists. Throughout this tortuous and fruitless ...”

“... impasse in which the West now finds itself, an impasse in large part of its own making. Hollande may speak confidently of a war to destroy IS once and for all, but his options are limited, and unpalatable, and his lack of imagination imposes further constraints. Mass arrests, interrogations and surveillance could make France safer in the short term, only to ...”

“... and ‘compromised by the severe censorship they were subjected to’ in the Soviet Union. This may be a bit harsh: when I went back to the memoirs after reading the diaries, they struck me as rather less misleading and tendentious than you might expect; the concessions to Soviet orthodoxy (on such matters as the Non-Aggression Pact, the Finnish War and the ...”

“... knowledge, a body of opinions, and a standard of taste, which are wholly new in India. There you may see universities thronged like the European schools of the later middle age … There you may observe an eagerness in the study of Western literature and science not very unlike the enthusiasm of European scholars at the ...”

“... contradiction in Western societies’ – between the need to work and the desire for play – may yet be resolved. These, evidently, are definitions for the 21st century. But Lawrence’s novel may be thought in some ways to prefigure them. Various genealogies of cool have been proposed, ever more speculative in ...”

“... full niqabs, including black gloves. Alexandria, once known as the queen of the Mediterranean, may no longer be the city of ‘unsurpassable sensuality’ described by Cavafy, but it seems more serene than Cairo. Maybe that was an illusion: the only difference between Alexandria and Cairo, someone said, was the weather. Egypt’s second-largest city, with ...”

“... The use of the Lombardic style – which Pevsner noted as ‘original’ for the early 1840s – may not strike the non-specialist as particularly remarkable, but a large stone tortoise, protruding like a gargoyle from under the eaves, certainly will. A tour of the building reveals that the tortoise’s companions include a snake, a crocodile, a dragon and a ...”

“... mayor of London since he succeeded Livingstone in 2008, did. As he runs for re-election on 3 May, he can say he did what he promised, sort of. Within three years of coming to power, he swept the last bendy bus off London’s roads. (In their heyday, there were four hundred.) At his behest, and in exchange for £11.4 million, a Northern Irish company ...”

“... It may seem perverse to begin an essay on India by invoking a historian of France: Eugen Weber, who died this year, a colleague of mine and a formidable presence at UCLA. He wrote a book in 1976 on how France became a proper nation by transforming ‘peasants into Frenchmen’. But the Weber I knew, and bantered with during the last years of his life, also had an Indian past of which he felt periodically obliged to speak, though he spoke of it to me with discomfort ...”

“... bleak emotional weather of autobiographical works such as Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). Coetzee may not actively seek this response, but he can hardly be surprised by it. In Diary of a Bad Year a character who closely resembles the author – more of this figure later – imagines his father’s opinion of him. ‘A selfish child, he must have thought, who ...”

“... the emergence of leftist presidents at the head of indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador, may yet produce a surprise result in Paraguay’s elections. Fernando Lugo, a 58-year-old former bishop, emerged two years ago as the unexpected candidate of the freshly minted left-wing opposition, and has been leading in the opinion polls ever since. With a ...”

“... you? The bonus question is often seen as a tragicomic footnote to the business of banking, but it may be that it goes close to the heart of the problem of how we got to be in this place. Through history, the great fortunes have been made by people directly taking risks on their own account. Today, great fortunes are made by employees, doing nothing other than ...”

“... you can describe what you are feeling as love. Love finally goes beyond reason – someone else may see what you see in your partner while not being in the least in love with him or her – but it is not antithetical to reason, as writers afraid of being robbed of their brooding inwardness by some bloodless theorist sometimes believe of their ...”