“... from Moscow. Francis Wheen, the author of a recent biography of Marx, made a similar point. The man had finally emerged from under the political debris, and barely resembled the quasi-religious icon and prophetic travesty of the 20th century. Jacques Attali’s book is another remarkable signpost on the same new landscape. The author isn’t a ...”

“... of loyalty to the Bush family. With Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantánamo to think of, Gates was a man to trust. Also, Gates might help to slow and muffle the incessant pressure from Cheney and his circle for an attack on Iran. It is generally supposed that Gates, together with Condoleezza Rice, held Cheney off and gave Bush the institutional backing to resist ...”

“... was a highly skilled open-sea navigator, an invaluable Polynesian go-between, and the kind of man whom Banks recognised as the local version of a gent – ‘certainly a most proper man, well born’. Cook didn’t want him on board, but Banks decided to take him at his own expense. ‘Thank Heaven,’ Banks wrote in ...”

“... that are all the same length, inducing a kind of highway hypnosis; 3) a general feeling that Alain de Botton is somewhere, wearing a Dan Flashes shirt. Everything is like a riddle that an enormous snail poses before allowing you to cross a bridge. On one page, the appearance of rigour, on the next, statements like this: ‘It is impossible to be an atheist ...”

“... of course, who would have the same kind of powers as the French President – the Communists had de Gaulle and the Paris events of 1968 in mind. Fully democratic elections would not be held until 1993, after a four-year parliamentary term. The reformers in the Party expected the ‘system’ to last. Stanislaw Ciosek, the Politburo member who more than ...”

“... so they can go across rough country to watch birds. It contains ‘deep greens’ who believe that man should take a lesson from the nomads, live in harmony with the rhythms of nature, consume resources sparingly, reduce the human population and do something about urban blight. It contains people who worry about the ozone layer, lead in petrol, and radioactive ...”

“... of thought; sometimes, like Asia in Prometheus Unbound, he believed that Prometheus ‘gave man speech, and speech created thought.’ Shelley’s idealism asserted the constitutive power of language; his scepticism noted not only the habit by which a Thou congeals into an It but the fact that the triumphs of poetry are but partial and fleeting. This ...”

“... we have not seen the emergence of Trumpist oligarchs. What we do see are Trumpist enablers, the Paul Ryans and Mitch McConnells who have been happy to push through deregulation measures and massive tax cuts for the upper echelons. These enablers have set about realising Steve Bannon’s goal of ‘deconstructing the administrative state’, in effect ...”

“... which were used to cover a gap in the telegraph network between Brussels and Aachen, giving Paul Reuter a monopoly over all telegraph traffic between Belgium and Germany. The five sons of Mayer Amschel Rothschild used pigeons to stay in touch as they travelled around Europe consolidating their father’s banking dynasty. During the Siege of Paris in ...”

“... finished. When Mies drew her attention to the excellence of his chief draftsman, she sat in the man’s office for hours practising mechanical drawing after persuading him to give her lessons. ‘I took my drawing board and T-square with me when I travelled, even to Paris,’ she writes.Lambert’s account is so engaging not only because it is the story of ...”

“... on Bond Street introduced time into the vision of souls, bliss, beauty: Hirst’s objets de vertu were ephemeral, and fell to the ground after their short span was done. They invert the usual definition of art as eternal, countering time and decay. The words tempus and temple share the same root; the connection suggests that the function of a sacred ...”

“... considers the careers of ten who made their names in the decade. By 1950 change was coming. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published in English in 1953. There were increasing opportunities for women who were bold and determined enough to take them. Yet for all Cooke’s justified satisfaction in finding so many possible subjects from which to make ...”

“... In​ 1984 Guillaume Dustan drafted a personal ad: ‘In brief: young man, eighteen, hypokhâgne, Lycée Henri-IV, short brown hair, 1.7 metres, part preppy, part 1950s greaser, not very sporty – sensual – funny, neither a party animal nor a bookworm. Now let’s see if the feeling is mutual …’ Written when he still went by the name William Baranès, it anticipates the Guillaume Dustan to come: the pointed mention of his prestigious schooling; the importance of cultivating ‘a look’ (often imported from America); the fear of being consigned to a particular identity or sphere (either the nightclub or the library) that might foreclose some as yet unknown experience ...”

“... a Lady Chatterley-ish story of a woman, Eva, who flees an unhappy marriage with a wealthy older man, and falls in love with a young engineer called Adam. Machaty had planned a close-up of the heroine’s face as Adam kisses her and wanted the audience to be in no doubt that she had indeed reached a state of ‘ecstasy’, in Eden, with her Adam. The trouble ...”

“... years between them, one with an older woman, Margaret and Ivan, and one with the more usual older man, Peter and Naomi; a filial and a quasi-filial pair, Peter and Ivan, and Ivan and Sylvia; and one age-matched couple, Peter and Sylvia. Across expected lines of sympathy and understanding, new groupings form, and each makes at least one unexpected gesture ...”