“... launched at the end of the 18th century by the American and French Revolutions’, which ‘may well turn out to be the most significant of them all, partly because of its sheer human scale, and partly because of its location, a substantial bridgehead of effervescent liberty on the Asian continent’. This is ‘the most interesting country in the ...”

“... execution; each sentence must be determined individually and according to rules. These standards may, in practice, be impossibly high and, once again, race is part of the reason. As every prosecutor and defence attorney would know, black jurors are far more likely to spare the lives of the accused than their white counterparts. Perhaps, as McFeely ...”

“... the head of the DFB (the German FA), Peco Bauwens (who, according to his own son, may have killed his Jewish wife), ‘invoked Wotan, the supreme Germanic deity whose spirit underpinned the more mystical aspects of Nazism, before speaking of the importance of Führerprinzip’. Bavarian radio cut away from the proceedings and lost the ...”

“... tumbling down in flames. There are also pointless fistfights whenever the director feels the going may be slow. Lots of broken windows too. But the abstraction carries an interesting anxiety. The bad guy in Batman Begins, and one of the bad guys in The Dark Knight, is a vigilante like Batman: in the first case a good guy who goes too far (Liam Neeson wants to ...”

“... tells him that he is exceptional. He has so much energy for work, parties, plays, travel. His wife may be tired out, but not him! Not yet. And she is so unhappy; perhaps he even convinces himself that her suffering is caused by the pressures of family life, that she will improve if they are removed. He is insistent: she must go, though he will not brook the ...”

“... and promising to ask Camden, the lord chancellor, to tell Castlereagh as much. Over the course of May and June 1809, as machinations continued, nobody told Castlereagh, who was preoccupied with illness and with the war. The king did not like Canning, as Hunt puts it, because he was not ‘one of us’: ‘the only member of the cabinet who was neither a lord ...”

“... the table in Vermeer’s painting of a Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window. The letter may have no words on it, the lover is fictional, and the objects in the picture have been artfully positioned, but, Brook comments, ‘the world is real, and that is what we are in pursuit of.’ The door that opens from the china bowl in the Vermeer household ...”

“... to have been defeated. The gradual draw-down of troops implied in Medvedev’s announcement may have more to do with tightening budgets in Moscow than with conditions in the field: that same evening, Russian troops once again clashed with separatist fighters in the Shali region. Such battles take place on a more or less weekly basis, resulting in a ...”

“... and fugue by Bach, and groaning like Glenn Gould. She tells him their father has had a stroke, may not live long, and Bobby should go and see him. We perceive the story of estrangement instantly, because it’s the basic relation of father and son in all American stories of this kind. Maybe Dupea will go up to Washington State, maybe he won’t. But he ...”

“... rhetorical device which dismisses a strong counter-opinion as a ‘tedious riposte’ – what may be termed the ‘that old chestnut’ gambit. There seems no place for a candid friend of Israel in this account of a long history when a territorial state of Israel did not exist, followed by a very different period when it has existed. Recently, as I dealt ...”

“... an innate responsiveness to the feelings and needs of others. ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed,’ Smith wrote in the opening lines of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ‘there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from ...”

“... Gallery The curators of her first major solo exhibition in Britain (at Tate Liverpool until 31 May) would rather focus on her diverse practice than her biography, but it’s impossible to make sense of her art without it. The only daughter of a wealthy Lancashire family, Carrington was repeatedly expelled from the Catholic boarding schools her tycoon ...”

“... hope. All lovelessness is bitter. A day will come. I do admire your purpose. When I am killed, you may not fail to want me.However desperate the longing, these full-stopped lines have the numb feeling of words no sooner said than repeated ad nauseam, like passionate love songs heard echoing from a tannoy. Moore enjoys varying a phrase by turning it round and ...”

“... will just about keep Ann in asparagus over Coronation week, and I am praying that something may be forthcoming from one of the reprint societies, or the films, to offset my meagre returns from what has turned out to be a successful book. There are a few letters to the Flemings’ more famous friends (Somerset Maugham, Claudette Colbert, their Jamaica ...”

“... couldn’t borrow in the market to cover their short-term commitments. But even the least punitive may question whether selective resignations and carefully worded expressions of contrition are enough to restore public trust. It is difficult, if possible at all, to conceive that when Oliver Franks, the epitome of the ‘great and good’ of his day, was ...”