“... was extraordinary the degree to which everything ultimately revolved around this one man’ – which Garton Ash observed as a participant alongside Václav Klaus or Jirí Dienstbier in the headquarters of the Civic Forum, ‘the very heart of the revolution’, as the old order disintegrated around it. Adventurer and admirer have seldom been so ...”

“... Behind me and a couple of other cashiers sat the manager, a kindly, depressive middle-aged man who sorted all the bets by hand, totted up the wins and losses on a calculator and kept a doleful eye on the rest of us. He didn’t say much. Only very occasionally did he intervene. I have three distinct memories of working there. The first is of the ...”

“... Busson. My mistake.) Some of its trustees turn up in politics: the Conservatives’ Lord Fink and Paul Marshall, a Lib Dem and chairman of Marshall Wace, a large hedge fund. Marshall is also the chair of the DfE’s board of non-executive directors. Until recently, Sir Theodore Agnew of the Inspiration Trust, which runs 12 schools in Norfolk, was also a Ned ...”

“... or lawyerly approach to political philosophy, ticking off useful concepts and ignoring the rest. Paul Johnson (perhaps not the most reliable witness) described her as ‘the most ignorant politician of her level that I’d come across until I met Tony Blair’, but he thought she was at least touchingly aware of her ignorance, ‘the eternal scholarship ...”

“... Bible while Dr Moynihan molested Lucia and her sister, which, as the protagonist in ‘Panteón de Dolores’ muses, he must have done to their mother too. Their only real protection was the mythic and tequila-breathing Uncle John, who always knew what to say, crying out ‘this situation calls for enchiladas’ whenever things really disintegrated. He had ...”

“... sort of political thought which sets aside questions about both the will of God and the nature of man and dreams of creating a new kind of human being. Simultaneously, the Romantic poets were showing what can happen when art is no longer thought of as imitation, but rather as self-creation. These poets made it plausible for art to claim the place in culture ...”

“... In November​ 2017, Marc Gabolde, an Egyptologist at Paul Valéry University in Montpellier, received a grainy photograph on his phone from a colleague attending the opening party for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The picture showed a pink granite stele on display at the museum. Had Gabolde seen it before? If not, what did he think? The stele was dated to 1327 BCE and came from Abydos, a sacred city on the upper banks of the Nile ...”

“... reads extracts from his essay about migration. The full article is below. A young, personable man who speaks fair English, Hamraz had been in Dunkirk for about a month when we met. He was a member of the Afghan National Army, from the district of Azra, south-east of Kabul. Early in 2011, going home on leave, he was called to account by local Taliban as a ...”

“... years of the mid-20th century, and each good-sized deep sea vessel had twenty men on board; each man at sea supported four jobs on land. The fishermen were paid a share of the profits made from each three-week trip; after a three-day break they went to sea again, a rhythm that sent pulses of cash-rich fishermen racing to the fleshpots and trinketries of ...”

“... his audience that the Berlin Schools had the edge over the Bauhaus. By then the director, Bruno Paul, had already been dismissed. In 1937 the Nazis staged the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. (Salomon, David Foenkinos imagines in his novel, ‘positions herself on the side of the despised artists’.) In 1938, she submitted a piece for an anonymous fine ...”

“... the novel needs another force, which emerges as the more determined and unconflicted figure of Paul Muniment, who is all outwardness, decisiveness and manliness, with politics that are focused, thought-out, physical, set against Robinson’s ambiguous sexual and social presence. But drama in the novel can only occur when Hyacinth’s bookishness, his soul ...”

“... a crisis does hit, the Met too often gives the media inaccurate information. After Jean Charles de Menezes, an unarmed civilian, was shot dead by anti-terrorism officers in 2005, Scotland Yard said that he had been acting suspiciously (he hadn’t). When Ian Tomlinson, a passer-by at the G20 protests in 2009, died after being struck by an officer, police ...”

“... world has always been divided between the Club and the Mob,’ one veteran columnist, channelling de Tocqueville, said … ‘I’m afraid I’m on the side of the Club.’If a column was about economics, culture or science, you could have ‘quite a reasonable discussion. If it was about feminism, or Israel/Palestine or Islam or immigration, then the threads ...”

“... I had had when I was eighteen. It was a rich and instructive experience.At an event in Berkeley, a man in the audience said there was a passage from the book he wanted to hear me read. During the intervening years, I have had such requests a handful of times, always from men, always involving a passage that turns out to have some kind of sexual content. But at ...”

“... was the last thing on anybody’s mind. Anybody’s, that is, except Sir Fred’s. He’s an easy man to dislike. Even his face, pinched and complacent, is easy to dislike. In a wider perspective, however, the pension question is something of a non-story. We are exposed to such gigantic losses through the financial crisis that it doesn’t really matter if ...”