“... to the Turks, who were often denounced for degeneracy – swords, slippers and sexual excess, as Richard Cobden put it – the Arabs were often admired for manly simplicity. David Urquhart, secretary at the embassy in Constantinople, wrote that Islam was not a false religion to be ridiculed: it taught no new dogmas, propounded no fanciful revelation and ...”

“... in the Suffolk volumes – and the rest of the BoE – is hard to gauge, but much of what you read about you can’t easily see. The gatehouse to what was once Butley Priory is one example. The guide doesn’t tell you that it can be rented: it sleeps 11 and costs £900 a night (the pictures on the priory’s website show interiors of light stone and ...”

“... means to ends came about. Earlier natural theologians – including William Paley, whom Darwin read closely – had argued instead for the creationist view that only an intervening intelligence could explain the fittedness of eyes, wings and so on to their offices. Paley’s version of the design argument took organic adaptation to be decisive evidence for ...”

“... may have been quoting Churchill). At bedtime, tears would gather in his blue-bloodshot eyes as he read his favourite poems to us. John Dowland’s ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’ was a favourite. Another was Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me’. Both injunctions not to cry made us cry too, as such injunctions ...”

“... from the age of 18 you will, on average, be 700,000 years old before you win the jackpot, and if Richard Branson succeeds in his bid for the People’s Lottery you’re more likely to be a million. The newsagent in question is on Willesden High Road, where every shop that isn’t a newsagent is a takeaway. The streets of low-rise housing go on for ever and ...”

“... unskilled role with as much speed and efficiency as they could muster. The Front was, as Richard Rhodes put it in The Making of the Atom Bomb, an industrial operation for the manufacture of corpses. Disney and Kroc were great admirers of Ford (as was Lenin) and saw assembly lines as the embodiment of efficiency, order and consistency. These lines ...”

“... Darwinism. The fossil record shows that the Genesis version of creation is manifestly wrong if read literally, and one is left either questioning the authority of the Bible or recognising that it is a prolonged exercise in metaphor – and as such open to endless interpretation. Moreover, it is difficult for a committed Darwinist to view humans, who form ...”

“... he feels ‘both homicidal and suicidal’. He means it, too. All this makes his Diaries a strange read, because they are interesting, indeed fascinating, in many of their details, yet draining and demoralising in their cumulative effect. Reading this book is like standing listening to someone ranting and jabbing their finger in your chest, for hours, but ...”

“... from the dead. Mein Kampf, Knausgaard says, is ‘literature’s only unmentionable work’. To read it is to travel into a forbidden zone. What Knausgaard finds when he breaches the taboo is a crumpled, Hitler-shaped image of himself. The hated father, the beloved mother, the fear of intimacy, the sense of outsiderhood and the ponderous seriousness with ...”

“... a 1970s TV comedy star, and there’s a life-size cardboard cut-out of him in the barn; in Spring, Richard makes TV documentaries; and the slow-dreaming, 104-year-old Daniel Gluck (whom we first met in Autumn and who returns in Summer – a man for all seasons) awakes from his reveries and returns to the present when he hears a song he wrote playing on the TV ...”

“... But above all it is an account of how Ali – who, like comrades such as Perry Anderson, Richard Gott and Robin Blackburn, is now in his eighties – has sustained a particular kind of political life, which younger leftists are unlikely to be able to enjoy.Ali’s first volume of memoirs, Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties, was ...”

“... and found he was good at it, meticulous and with a keen eye for detail. Working with the printer Richard Clay and Sons, he was able to match all details of the original pamphlets, with the exception of the paper stock. His versions, he boasted, were ‘as exact a representation as it has been found possible’, with each ‘printer’s error, dropped letter ...”

“... been imported into the Anglo-British state in the form of the Freedom of Information Act. But, as Richard Norton-Taylor’s pugnacious book shows, it’s a newborn right still struggling to survive against a centuries-old tradition of government.The structure of the ‘British’ state is still essentially monarchical. Constitutionally, the rest of the ...”

“... in Beijing offer only grossly biased accounts of ‘the Beijing turmoil’, at least few read them and fewer still believe them: the Chinese press is government-controlled. Western accounts of ‘the Tiananmen massacre’ are also biased and even more inaccurate, but many read them and most believe them: the ...”

“... are the most significant to survive, should be her memorial and that their meaning was to be read in their fabric. The decades after Losh’s death were a low point for English biography, in which lives of ‘great men’ dominated a mostly barren field. Nevertheless, in 1873 Losh’s much younger friend, a Carlisle doctor called Henry Lonsdale, who had ...”