“... in another odd reversal, I secretly wonder to myself whether the system of duties and deadlines may now save me, although I know that my illness creeps invisibly on, more secretly and insidiously than the time announced by my first watch, which I carried with so little awareness of how it numbered my mortality, divided it up into perfect, unchanging ...”

“... they make the first concessions to reform. Describing the first session of the Estates General, in May 1789, she notes: ‘One of those taking in the scene . . . was a young lawyer called Maximilien Robespierre.’ She adds no comment; the nodding and winking lie between the lines. A big finger from heaven is pointing at one small, singular man with a forked ...”

“... and one demonstrator, Blair Peach, was killed. Blair Peach’s funeral, 13 June 1979. On 27 May the following year, an inquest jury reached a verdict in Peach’s case of death by misadventure. But the jurors had not been given access to all the relevant information. Soon after Peach’s death, Commander John Cass, chief of the Metropolitan Police’s ...”

“... more than three times higher than that of the best of its human opponents. ‘Quiz-show contestant may be the first job made redundant by Watson,’ one of the vanquished men said, ‘but I’m sure it won’t be the last.’ Watson’s achievement is a sign of how much progress has been made in machine learning, the process by which computer algorithms ...”

“... is actually a protest against Bashar al-Assad’s regime; government security forces may appear at any moment. My first two attempts to get to Qudsaya failed when armed police and militia showed up at the last minute and the demonstrations were cancelled. Along with Barzeh, a northeastern suburb of Damascus, Qudsaya is the nearest place to the ...”

“... baseball team, and part of Ansett airlines until it went broke, and the US TV Guide. Some of us may be aware that he owns 70 per cent of Australia’s newspaper industry, and one of its main television channels. He is the unmoved mover behind The Simpsons, That 70s Show, Married with Children, Fight Club, The Full Monty, Ally McBeal, Buffy the Vampire ...”

“... the future tank became a naval project. Swinton did not learn of this development until late in May, but Churchill had made considerable progress in the meantime. A new Landships Committee was to be chaired by Tennyson d’Eyncourt, a submarine expert. Its secretary was Albert Stern, a banker in civilian life. By the end of summer there was general ...”

“... consummation of my despair I understand that – should he ever recover – both these affections may remain with him for life. Good God! What a destiny of horror! Scarcely 18 years of age, just entering the portals as it were of life, and already cut off from all intercourse with his fellow-creatures, and immured in endless darkness! He himself, poor ...”

“... plates.Labour had its revenge on the Tories for the loss of the National Care Service: Theresa May’s proposal to include the value of an individual’s home in calculating their full social care costs – it currently counts only towards residential care – helped destroy her majority in the 2017 election (the media called it the ‘dementia tax’). In ...”

“... perfunctory kisses’ and ‘breath that stank of beer and caries and onions’. The ‘au pair’ may have been a whitish lie.Trev wanted desperately to do the right thing by his housemaid, and it is not inconceivable that he was sent to the Hermitage – as she was sent ‘into London somewhere’ – to separate them. While he was at the Hermitage, he heard ...”

“... its grip, Updike gathered rosebuds wherever he lay. In letters to girlfriends, he rues that he may have fallen short (‘Will I ever be able to suck hard enough to please you?’), giving fine expression to Benjamin Franklin’s American credo of continual self-improvement, but post-coital tristesse and agenbites of inwit are rare. ‘And how nicely you ...”

“... Antigone’. It is one thing to be Antigone to one’s father, but to be Antigone to his Movement may have been a distraction for Anna as well as a destiny. Oedipus, after all, did not start a new profession. Freud managed to live virtually half his life – what he came to think of as the most significant half – without psychoanalysis. Anna lived her whole ...”

“... it had ample reason for satisfaction with the fundamental norms of international Order. That may well be the main reason why the moment passed without producing disaster. I suppose, however, that one should not altogether discount the reassuring Reagan persona, the tranquillising effect of a few hundred billion additional dollars spent on defence, the ...”

“... It may surprise those who do not already know it that the world centre for the study of the life and work of Bertrand Russell is at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Shortly before he died Russell sold his vast collection of manuscripts and personal papers to McMaster for a huge sum of money in order to finance the various projects of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation ...”