“... on cigars’ and dishing out blame. Cameron blames Gove for opposing him, as well as Theresa May and Philip Hammond for their advice on the negotiations with Germany, Theresa Villiers and Priti Patel for not repaying the ‘leg up’ he gave them, Gove’s wife – everyone but himself. Having ‘vented’, however, he gets his first good night’s sleep ...”

“... and Ethiopia have led to long panel discussions about whether or not it is alarmist to think we may be on the verge of the first transboundary water war. That war hasn’t yet materialised, but neither has an agreement, and the reservoir is filling. When people in Egypt talk about this fact, the body part they gesture to most often is the throat: two hands ...”

“... an official mandate to pursue an inflation target of 2 per cent), but while interest rate rises may have the effect of depressing economic activity – and even deflating the housing market – there’s a limit to the influence they can have on energy and food prices, when there are real material and geopolitical reasons that those prices are high. There ...”

“... Antoninus, Ingenuus and Regalianus are all barely known apart from their coinages. To this list we may perhaps now add the Sponsianus whose anomalous gold coins, housed in Glasgow’s Hunterian and long dismissed as modern forgeries, sparked a Twitterstorm in December, when an earth scientist suggested that mineral deposits and surface abrasion authenticated ...”

“... he came to regret (his account of this episode has been deleted from the English translation). In May 1969 the Minister transferred him back to the Academy’s Institute of Physics in Moscow where his career had begun, with a modest salary to supplement his Academician’s income. Sakharov describes his scientific work from then on as minor: most of his ...”

“... circles of Northern humanism, the creation, not to say the construct, of Erasmus. Details may be arguable. Only now and again, however, as in her account of the intellectual implications of a little collected volume at Yale which may have belonged to More’s and Erasmus’s friend Cuthbert Tunstal, does she fail to ...”

“... popular books now on sale, Mao Zedong and Shaoshan, is driven to a rare editorial comment: We may remember that when Mao went swimming in 1959, a sea of spectators covered the hills in a great hubbub of welcoming cries, refusing to go even when it was dusk, so that Mao could appreciate the affection of his fellow villagers. This time the hillside was ...”

“... as ‘head of state’ and talking of ‘I, as a government’. Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson may have fulminated against her, in the course of reviewing this book, but they helped launch the good ship Thatcher and sailed in her fatly for many a year, long sustaining and defending her against those who objected from the outset to government by ...”

“... to a progressive theory of the audience. He suggests that ‘the reader of the Star, whose life may otherwise feel like the bottom of the heap’, sees through the parade of supposed information and recognises it for what it is, a fairly crude performance: ‘and this recognition, this small daily feat of seeing through the cheeky buggers, is a daily source ...”

“... fun – full of wit & originality & poetry – dashes of Meredith & even Whitman’. She may have shared Lily Bart’s ignorance of Greek, but when she reread Aeschylus’s trilogy a year after publishing The House of Mirth, the version she chose was a distinguished German translation. Having received a copy of Barrett Wendell’s Traditions of ...”

“... KKK is not a South African organisation and no one knew who its ‘members’ really were – they may even have been the Security Police out of uniform. Rowley received a tip-off about the first attack and had a large contingent of ANC activists hidden in the garden to ambush the Klan. Among them was the writer Tom Sharpe, who peeped out from behind a tree at ...”

“... than the one so devotedly acquired by Sahagun. Entranced by Brading’s parabola, the reader may be tempted to forget two important, shadowed aspects of the Spanish American story. The index to his book contains no entry for capitalism. But it was surely capitalism that played the key role in destroying the Old Order. Borbon ‘reform’ was at bottom a ...”

“... PLO, no to a Palestinian state. Their only positive contribution was Yitzhak Shamir’s plan of May 1989 for elections on the West Bank and Gaza leading to limited autonomy. But Shamir only put this idea forward in response to pressure from Washington and he gave it up at the first indication that the Palestinians might accept it. The Gulf War produced a ...”

“... in 1840. No one seems to have suspected George Drysdale (while those who were in on the secret may have numbered no more than half a dozen). Drysdale was not a candidate for suspicion, in the sense that not many people even knew of his existence. He moved to London in the mid-1850s, and is listed at various Central London addresses in the Medical ...”

“... about them and a mysterious past.’ This is a tackily put insight, but a ‘mysterious past’ may have its value for our imagination in not being imagined by us. To imagine much beyond the scope of the film is a form of projection that may tell us about the projector but can only negatively – by exceeding it – tell ...”