“... And how could she be expected to finish Mussolini’s The Cardinal’s Mistress (‘the Lord knows I tried’) or Forty Thousand Sublime and Beautiful Thoughts (‘conscientious though I be, I am but flesh and blood’)? When Dwight Macdonald identified ‘amiability’ as the distinctive quality of New Yorker criticism, he wasn’t thinking of ...”

“... French vignerons, who had grown financially dependent on his quality assessments. Parker is now ‘Lord of the Grapes’: Time magazine announced that ‘for countless wine lovers, Robert Parker’s tastes are infallible’; the Economist wrote that ‘Mr Parker’s palate is thought to be the oenological equivalent of Einstein’s brain’; and the Atlantic ...”

“... talk as if the president of Russia did not exist’. (Is this what Putin had in mind when – as Lord Browne, the former president of BP, recently revealed in his memoirs – he said: ‘I have eaten more dirt than I need to from that man’?) Best of all, perhaps, once the case got going the authorities were able to start landing Yukos with enormous tax ...”

“... and other traditions which help us to live with inequality; we like our judges and lawyers, our lord mayors and equerries, to appear in pantomime clothes on solemn occasions. Among the gilets jaunes there’s no shortage of ‘Frexit’ advocates on Saturday demonstrations, with their elaborate combination of hi-vis uniform and fancy dress. But Frexit packs ...”