“... that successive Tory leaders have stuck to it. The 0.7 per cent figure was reached in 2013, on David Cameron’s watch, an achievement regarded with pride. Theresa May, on the eve of her departure from Downing Street, went out of her way to reaffirm the commitment. Even Boris Johnson is standing by it – for now. The promise that DFID will remain a ...”

“... of annotating any Paterian text. The general editors of the new Oxford edition, Lesley Higgins and David Latham, have embarked on the project with bravura: ‘The ten volumes of The Collected Works of Walter Pater are commissioned to serve scholars as the definitive edition for at least as long as the unscholarly 1910 Library Edition has served.’ Volumes III ...”

“... Powell is leaning against the pocked metal of his cell onboard the USS Saugus, where he was being held, his manacles just in sight; he is moodily handsome, in a round-necked shirt, his hair greased into a slouching side-parting, with a hint of five o’clock shadow. ‘Now,’ one woman guesses; ‘2007,’ says another, admirably specific. On 7 July 1865, a ...”

“... on this premeditated and systematic degradation of the humanity of an entire population, David Cameron characterised the Gaza Strip as a ‘prison camp’ and – for once – did not neuter this assessment by subordinating his criticism to proclamations about the jailers’ right of self-defence against their inmates. It’s often claimed that ...”

“... Room (students at SOAS had gone into occupation two days before). A general meeting was then held to draft their demands. The most important, and most often repeated, is that UCL’s management issue a statement ‘condemning all cuts to higher education’. They also want things they might be able to get: for the university to pay UCL cleaners the ...”

“... with wartime controls was an aberration. (Wartime America was much less obedient.) Cartoon by David Langdon for ‘Punch’, November 1949. Mark Roodhouse’s answer to the crude question of just how much black market activity there was in Britain, both during the war and in the period of postwar austerity, is that, though widespread, it was far less so ...”

“... for its innovations and its geniuses and scoff at it for thinking it invented human nature. (David Hume, late of that parish, invented human understanding, or a treatise of that name, and that’s quite different.) Meanwhile, we can love Glasgow for its rebel spirit and its demotic energy while noting the piousness of Bearsden and Milngavie. Scotland ...”

“... to undermine British government protests at the Guantanamo monstrosity as it affects the Britons held there, and to make ministers’ efforts on their behalf look hypocritical. It is perhaps a measure of the extent to which SIAC has been hobbled by the legal imperatives handed down by the higher courts that the commission has not so far allowed a single ...”

“... it, because not understanding it in scientific terms is not to understand it at all, but David Bodanis, the author of E=mc2, is not one of them. As someone to whom science has always been a black hole, I see Bodanis and those who bother to try to explain to the likes of me what they understand mathematically as therapists of a sort. Not to understand ...”

“... only way he will be able do it. Nevertheless, Trump’s appointment as his ambassador to Israel of David Friedman, a long-time contributor to the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and an unhinged right-winger who has accused Israeli and American Jewish supporters of a two-state solution as being ‘worse than kapos’, hardly supports the notion ...”

“... on his entitlement to privacy and on his right to freedom of expression. He lost. The High Court held that he had no reasonable expectation of privacy since blogging is essentially a public activity, and that in any event the public interest in knowing that it was a policeman who was excoriating politicians and the police service outweighed any privacy ...”

“... like: he had never seen it, only heard his father’s stories. After a pogrom in which Cossacks held a pistol to his head and ransacked the family home, my great-grandfather left Mostyska. He started training as a cantor in Grosswardein (now Oradea in Romania) but the First World War disrupted his studies and after reluctant service in the Imperial Army he ...”

“... her face.’ The cruel precision of this figure reflects not so much Clark’s brutality as widely-held attitudes about the market value of female beauty and the implicit contrast with the value of women’s intelligence and art. Stafford explored this paradox in the harrowing short story she wrote about the accident. Awaiting the surgeon whose scalpel will ...”

“... for works by artists as different from each other as P.D. James, DV8 Physical Dance Theatre and David Lynch. Stephen Egger, an American academic and former policeman who wrote the first doctoral dissertation on the phenomenon, gives a definition/description of serial murder in Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon: A serial murder occurs when one or more ...”

“... But his development of this appeal to recent history does not turn out very happily. He cites David Marquand as an influential exponent of the view that Britain’s cultural conservatism in the 20th century was the result of an ossification of the values of liberal capitalist individualism which had served their turn and had had their day. ‘Such a view ...”