“... third, there is an infinite number of gradations.’ The new edition, which has an introduction by Robert Macfarlane, has an illustrated gate-post cover showing a variety of pebbles: a piece of amber from the Suffolk coast, a fragment of jet from the Yorkshire coast near Whitby. Nothing is static about a shoreline. Ancient glaciers made and carried colossal ...”

“... likely to make successful prosecution a cinch; Maryland, where the death penalty was suspended in May, couldn’t compete. But in any case, there’s a strong sense that it’s all over bar the date of execution. Very possibly that’s all people are interested in. The support of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence did not make much difference to ...”

“... in Benghazi against Ansar al-Sharia – the group accused of the attack on the US Consulate – may seem to offer hope, but it will take a lot more than one popular protest against one Islamist militia to rescue Libya from this catastrophic condition. Obama made a calamitous wrong call in endorsing the Nato intervention in March 2011. His defence secretary ...”

“... act and to be responsible for their actions is an essential aspect of who they are), and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) leading the yeses (he’s just had a difficult encounter with the mother of a young man they accidentally killed in a preceding film). Both are reasonable positions, and we may, according to our own ...”

“... The Peter Wright trial in Australia has recently brought out the full absurdity of this, with Sir Robert Armstrong attempting at one point to suggest that the very existence of MI5 and MI6 (let alone the identity of their directors) was a secret which could neither be confirmed nor denied. There is no other state in the world which behaves like this and ...”

“... so sold on the Early Victorian ethos? Interesting though unanswerable questions. What matters, it may be thought, is Browning’s audacity in denying us, in the closing verse, the full rhyme we’ve been so emphatically led to expect. Asymmetry, discontinuity – all the mileage that Modernist artists were to get from these principles is foreshadowed in this ...”

“... of whom? Of the executive, certainly; of the parties to the dispute; of external pressures which may distort judgment; of personal biases: and no doubt of more besides. The Universal Declaration on the Independence of Justice adopted in Montreal in 1983 asserts: ‘Judges individually shall be free, and it shall be their duty, to decide matters before them ...”

“... Star’ of their poetry, though Fenton’s minor masterpiece ‘A Vacant Possession’ may, and conceivably should, be what they strive to match. Reflexive, aleatory and cornucopian, the New Narrative deploys its fragmented and ramifying fictions to image the unpredictability of life, and its continuous shadowing by What Might Be. It seems, in ...”

“... of oure Lady Eton”, in the year 1440.’ So says Mark Dixon in An Eton Schoolboy’s Album. He may or may not have learned much history, but somewhere along the line Dixon, who left Eton in 1980, has learned how to write in an entertaining and elegant way. I find it difficult to judge the impression it might make on the ...”

“... secrecy is that any government which reveals how its predecessors spied upon their own populace may also face some embarrassing queries as to what comparable actions it is getting up to itself today. It is, at first sight, odd that we know a great deal more about the more necessarily secret world of military and foreign intelligence. The reasons for this ...”

“... massive, and unquestionably confiscated, correspondence, a remnant of which was acquired by Sir Robert Cotton? Where are the papers of Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More? Perhaps the former kept none; the latter, practising his famous discretion, very likely destroyed his in the months during which, still free, he could confidently look forward to his ...”

“... is not the first British poet to have been keen on boxing and, apparently, quite good at it: we may think of Lord Byron and Robert Graves. But few others, surely, have written and worried so concernedly about the ethics of this sport, its moral justification. Ring of Truth, his first novel since The Big Time in ...”

“... extreme actions that would jeopardise national order and harmony. That claim of exceptionalism may seem self-satisfied and insular now, but it rested on an assumption that social peace was hard won and that human sinfulness, as Gladstone put it, was ‘the great fact in the world’.Parliament’s function was not just to block rash policies; it also had a ...”

“... profile and monkish tonsure on display. Toulouse-Lautrec and van Dongen followed suit. Fénéon may not have liked it, but it was the more interesting view. In full face he looks as if he might be someone else: in old age he resembled Gide. Whereas the profile shot offered artists much more promising material: a big boney nose, prominent chin and, beneath ...”

“... not generally enjoyed by today’s Muslim minorities. Two of my paternal uncles, John and Robert, were blond and blue-eyed. John, in fact, was deployed after war service to the British Mandate force in Palestine. In uniform, he went into a Jewish-owned shop, and the shopkeeper said to a customer to whom she was speaking Yiddish: ‘Just a moment while ...”