“... pages of The Mirror and the Light dropped with a thud through my letterbox – some letterboxes may require modification to accommodate its girth. It covers a little more than four years of historical time, from the execution of Anne Boleyn in May 1536 to (no spoilers here, since this is where the whole three-act tragedy ...”

“... are patient, thoughtful and often imaginative, only occasionally, as the quotations in this piece may show, sounding genuinely old-fashioned as distinct from carefully archaic. As we read, we find ourselves asking why the desperately contemporary (or enduring) figures in these poems are dressed up like this, talking like this? Why are they pretending to be ...”

“... that rules the Kurdish enclaves along the border. I was 15 miles east of Tal Abyad at the end of May when Kurdish women soldiers in the frontline were speaking guardedly of the coming offensive. There was a constant roar of aircraft overhead, probably American, but I didn’t hear any airstrikes. Nujaan, a 27-year-old veteran of the Kurdish women’s ...”

“... Yet that was the political game to which Healey had given the best years of his life. Auden may have made a passing allusion to ‘the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting’, but Healey had, for forty years, spent taxing days drafting the former and weary evenings attending the latter. It was the struggle to which he had devoted himself: a ...”

“... media, and deployed his wealth to political and personal advantage. (In 2008, in a verdict that may or may not have been political in nature, he and his wife were convicted in absentia of a multi-million-pound property cheat.) He was cheerfully unabashed about diverting government largess towards regions that voted for ...”

“... the gasfield but Isis still controls most of Syria’s oil and gas production. The Caliphate may be poor and isolated but its oil wells and control of crucial roads provide a steady income in addition to the plunder of war. The birth of the new state is the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot Agreement ...”

“... and dates while denying what they were most anxious to convey: fear, horror and loathing. Sceptics may conclude that just as there was, to quote the exhibition’s accompanying book, a ‘19th-century view of the Vikings purely as raiders and killers’ – a view powered by the Victorians’ readiness to see themselves, their navy and the British Empire as a ...”

“... care to reward their poets, for they determine if and how their patrons will be remembered. You may think, St John continues, that the Greeks won at Troy and that Penelope was faithful to her husband because it pleased Homer to say so, but the facts are otherwise: E se tu vuoi che ’l ver non ti sia ascoso, tutta al contrario l’istoria converti: che i ...”

“... the smallest significant chance that X has happened, then we have no choice but to do Y.’ If X may lead to a catastrophe that must be avoided at all costs (like a nuclear attack on an American city), then we need to swing into action immediately and do Y. No further questions. Think about the real-world consequences of focusing in this way on the ...”

“... very much, but they sure do drink a lot’. What the real if apocryphally reported housekeepers may not have noted – obliged as they were to be constantly cleaning up after those chaste philosophical revellers – is that philosophers do talk about sex. True, until fairly recently, ‘professional philosophers’ (themselves a recent invention) couldn’t ...”

“... news feeds, graphs and spreadsheets that cover his computer screens, listening to the brokers he may deal through and taking calls from other banks, forming a judgment on the current momentum of the market and watching out for mispriced assets. Most markets cover similar products whose prices should move largely in line with each other. While having to guess ...”

“... If the past is another country where they do things differently, we may well ask whether we are abroad if we visit the England of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. In September 1528, Henry wrote to Anne: ‘No more to you at this present, mine own darling, for lack of time, but that I would you were in mine arms or I in yours, for I think it long since I kissed you ...”

“... who were charged with the maintenance of the scrolls exercised considerable licence, one may infer, in expanding or modifying their contents, incorporating elements of oral lore and inventing new materials. As Toorn trenchantly puts it, ‘the books of the Bible were not designed to be read as unities. They rather compare to archives. A biblical book ...”

“... displacement of people in Arab-dominated areas taken from IS, especially around Kirkuk. The KDP may succeed in pushing IS out of these areas and may even help retake Mosul, but if Washington fails to rein in the KDP’s territorial ambitions it is likely to find that the phenomenon of Sunni Arab radicalisation that ...”

“... flogging himself on the cross-trainer in the first place. But in another sense the affinity may be worth pursuing. Probably no book of essays could now do for its generation what Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination did in 1950 (it certainly couldn’t sell the 70,000 copies that collection shifted in hardback). But Against Everything does aspire to do ...”