“... little more than half the life, and there are crowded years ahead, though it is possible they may be less interesting. Ray Monk’s much-admired biography of Wittgenstein made one feel, for a while at any rate, that the subject’s weird ascetic life and his philosophy, which he himself felt sure no one would understand, could be represented as an ...”

“... the volume was not so interpreted by contemporaries on its appearance in September 1798, when it may actually have disappointed radical expectations. The first name on the title page was that of the out-of-town publisher Joseph Cottle of Bristol. It’s an odd fact that Cottle authors – the youthful Southey and Coleridge alone, together, or in conjunction ...”

“... 1945? Culturally, economically and socially the answers might be yes – ‘structuralists’ may even speculate about a slow process of liberalisation analogous to Spain’s, albeit without the push of turismo. But politically that outcome was always impossible because Nazi Germany was Hitler’s Germany, and Hitler wanted war even more than he wanted ...”

“... passion to keep its romantic soul without legislating political correctness. Today the French may be insecure about their cultural role in an expanding Europe, but they are still just as willing and eager to accept, nurture and make one of their own every American castaway from Jerry Lewis to La Toya Jackson. Paris, if not paradise, is the nearest thing ...”

“... Book Fair. If you have the bottle, you can penetrate embattled stacks of used books, where you may be effortlessly insulted by a sodality of even more used bookdealers, none of whom will lift their eyes from their chessboards or cadged newspapers. These places have become the clearing house for exhausted libertarian and ‘counterculture’ dreck. Soft ...”

“... with a method for determining the number of molecules in a given volume of air. While this may now sound rather quaint, before 1905 the existence of atoms and molecules was not taken for granted. This Brownian motion paper is one of the most frequently cited scientific publications of the 20th century, since the theory has many applications, ranging ...”

“... have intended individuals to fill up any particular station in which accidents of birth or fortune may have flung them.’ But it also accounts for his insistence on his wife’s retirement. A gentleman did not allow his wife to sing for money. And as it was impossible to be a public man without being a gentleman, ‘he could only move onto the public stage if ...”

“... littered with the technical terminology of ‘careful’ ancient history: ‘presumably’, ‘one may readily postulate’, ‘the odds are that’, ‘it is no more than a guess’, ‘no doubt’, ‘in all likelihood’, ‘on this hypothesis’. Such phrases occur literally hundreds of times throughout the book. The problem with this method is not its ...”

“... in 2016, and 111 killed and almost 2500 injured in 822 attacks in 2017.Modi was re-elected in May last year. On 5 August, the government stripped Jammu and Kashmir of statehood, dividing it into two separate territories, thus violating not only the state constitution but the Indian constitution as well. Jammu and Kashmir was the only Muslim majority state ...”

“... the Italy v. the North antithesis that Martens stakes out above. The art-historical trope may be hackneyed, it may bristle with point-scoring, but it sparked to life on the gallery walls.Fra​ Angelicos look truly strange when set next to Van Eycks. One 1430s predella panel, Scenes from the Life of St Nicholas of ...”

“... pitch among members of the ‘resistance’. Yet this desperation to keep his reputation warm may indicate the American liberal elite’s waning capacity for mythmaking rather than the resuscitation of the ‘liberal international order’.George Packer, arguably the most renowned American journalist of his generation, is more aware of the dangers of ...”

“... had won the right to be argued against. In 2012, when it lost its last seat on the council, it may have seemed plausible that its opponents had won the argument. In fact, the BNP had simply handed on the baton.In 2004, the BNP gained more than 800,000 votes in the European elections, some 700,000 more than it had previously, but Ukip won two and a half ...”

“... of the sort Marc Rich once took, transporting the oil of one state to the pipelines of another, may not be necessary. The oil that flows through the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline is now supplied by a company called Med-Red Land Bridge. Med-Red is a consortium between two Israeli hydrocarbon infrastructure firms and Petromal, a strange little oil services firm ...”

“... hardly any attempt to make our family history interesting.’ She experienced a kind of shame on 9 May each year when other grandparents came into her school with their war medals and bouquets of flowers. Almost no one in Stepanova’s family was a Communist Party member, but there were also no outspoken dissidents. Instead of great artists or writers, her ...”

“... that make for a good novel – the way that difference can feel threatening to anyone who may be dissatisfied with the path they took, or that some people may be irreversibly terrible. You can’t have it all. It’s unhealthy to think about utopia for more than thirty minutes per ...”