“... media ubiquity without being turned on, in one way or another – whether they’re Tony Blair, David Beckham, Princess Diana or Kate McCann. For Burn, celebrity is an irresistible force that always leads to obscenity and violence. Written hard, in a style that bears the clear influence of Martin Amis, his second novel, Fullalove (1995), is the memorable ...”

“... is a very delicate time,’ we are told in Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (1965), and again in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation. None of that ‘a long time ago’ stuff, especially since we’re not talking about the past. The action takes place in the first months of the year 10191. The year is also mentioned in Denis Villeneuve’s new version, which ...”

“... government minister,’ Brown wrote of his subject, ‘and his failure to achieve any high office may have been the result of a proper disinclination on the part of a man who knew that his talents were inappropriate. He was accused by some of laziness.’ One conclusion of Brown’s biography, which was based on his Edinburgh PhD, was that the charge of ...”

“... France 2 had to fudge their story. Olivier Mazerolle, the director of the channel, resigned; David Pujadas, the news anchorman, was suspended for two weeks: journalists at the station had threatened to strike unless they went. In Lloyd’s account, bizarrely, the scandal of Juppé’s volte face is of interest only to the extent that it provides the ...”

“... norms’. The qualifier ‘openly’ suggests that the most objectionable thing about Trump may be his discarding of the veil that conceals the scramble for power and wealth among the traditional ruling classes. Mounk does not consider the possibility that the official mendacity concerning illegal wars and assaults on civil liberties ...”

“... the story, gives a sense of progressive development, of movement towards a goal. Though that sense may still start to grow in individual episodes, to run the tape backwards is to check it, to arrest the leap of the heart as it bounds up. We are given a stronger sense of inevitability, of moments which, open when they were lived, are now frozen in time: each ...”

“... Church of England within Christendom. Fisher was undoubtedly the victim of royal tyranny, but it may be unhelpful to describe Henry VIII as ‘the most contemptible human specimen ever to sit upon the throne of England’. Moreover it is questionable whether Fisher displayed that capacity for leadership – ‘clarity and confidence of vision, tenacity of ...”

“... In the London Review of Books, John Maynard Smith said about scientists: ‘however interested they may be in politics or history or philosophy, their first love is science itself.’ If only I could follow this bent, and tell something of Hamilton as a mathematician. As it happens, he also wrote a good deal of poetry, but his poems lack the magic of his equations, which seem more beautiful and moving now than when they were imagined 150 years ago ...”

“... thing who had had a wild youth, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. This reappraisal, however grotesque, may in part have been motivated by a sudden desire to be analytical and reasonably truthful, after all the intoxicating polemics: but in part, too, it would have involved the prudent, politic fear that if Foot is now leader of the Labour Party he might well be ...”

“... by the restored Bourbons. Although now incorporated within a much larger museum complex, it may claim to be the earliest, as well as the most spectacular, surviving museum devoted to the art of the Middle Ages. Hill, however, concentrates her attention on Normandy, which was of special interest to British as well as French antiquaries. In the early ...”

“... about the room; a pair of shoes on the dining-room table. And what we regard as dirt someone else may prize; dirt is not natural but cultural. The move from the material to the metaphorical and cultural was often a short step; consider the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, from Emma Lazarus’s poem ‘The New Colossus’, where new immigrants from Europe ...”

“... be the thing on such occasions was given its head, and national sentiment ruled. The New Zealander David Kirk was first-rate: but the Scotsman too often talked through his kilt, and the Englishman proclaimed that he was absolutely sure that England would beat Australia in the final. At times it was like one of those ethnic jokes that people like to tell. There ...”

“... a year ago unknown in Britain and today unknown throughout the world. The other part, under David Owen, is being re-launched as the political wing of Sainsbury’s. At the Labour Conference there was little rejoicing over the demise of the Alliance: instead, the Party engaged in a self-critical assessment of its own part in bringing about a decade of ...”

“... states of affairs currently preoccupying and bedevilling the unhappy place. However, after reading David Lamb’s The Africans these responses should be leavened with another one – despair. For this comprehensive and valuable survey of the status quo in sub-Saharan Africa is such a depressing catalogue of human iniquity that the reader experiences the same ...”

“... David Daniell is also the author of the only full-length critical study of Buchan’s work – The Interpreter’s House (1975). Both there and here, in the introduction to this collection of 12 of Buchan’s stories, he is concerned to defend the writer against the usual accusations of anti-semitism, racism and blatant imperialism; to protest against the way he is automatically ranked with Sapper, Dornford Yates and similar figures; and to assert that he is not only worth reading (which the general public has never forgotten), but also worth reading seriously ...”