“... career, which once lay so near, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, he may sometimes doubt whether the self he murdered in that decisive hour might not have been the better of the two; but with the years such questions themselves expire, and the old alternative ego, once so vivid, fades into something less substantial than a ...”

“... to go to England should the rebellion be successful). Many Jacobites had followed them and some may have ‘pined by Arno’ for their ‘lovelier Tees’ – though that was just Macaulay’s Whiggish gloss. Several seem to have settled down quite happily in the milder climate. But the diplomats were kept busy by the rumours of plots and ...”

“... but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned … as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation. This extraordinary generosity ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan ...”

“... were profound. Roy Jenkins departed for Brussels; Anthony Crosland died tragically in office; David Owen succeeded him at the age of 38; and the scene was set both for the creation of a new centre party by the ‘Gang of Four’ and for its later disintegration. As Roy Jenkins says, although his conviction about the European Community was complete, his ...”

“... it,’ he told a convention of Southern Baptists in June, but ‘as Barbara and I prayed at Camp David before the air war began, we were thinking about those young men and women overseas. And I had the tears start down the checks, and our minister smiled hack, and I no longer worried how it looked to others.’ As his voice broke, and he paused to dab at his ...”

“... does not lie there but in birdwatching. In Buchan’s novels there is a nice variant, which we may call the principle of ‘not being really there’ (it recalls T. E. Lawrence to us). Buchan’s heroes tend to be in continual transit between the extremities of the Empire and, faced though you may be with them in a ...”

“... The Wonga Coup.* Roberts names more names than Mann does, including Jeffrey Archer’s (he may have donated money), and gives some broad hints as to the identity of Mann’s equivalent of Sir James Manson, here just called ‘the Boss’, who is supposed to have masterminded the whole affair. Apparently, Mann has ‘legal reasons’ for omitting all ...”

“... old friends and (last year’s useful word) old frenemies – people you don’t like but may someday need. The conference attracts literary scholars from all over the world. Sipping espresso at an outdoor café, I met a Swiss critic of contemporary French fiction, on his first trip to the United States. He was shocked by American coffee, but calmly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”