“... South, there was a joke in the Commons tearoom: ‘Line 1, between “there shall” and “be a Scottish Parliament”, insert “not”.’ Since the inception of the Scottish Parliament, Labour’s number of seats has dropped in every single election. In May it won just 17 out of 129, tied with Reform in a distant second place after the SNP, which ...”

“... When​ David Graeber left academia in 2005, he had no intention of going back. His contract had been cancelled by Yale, supposedly after colleagues objected to his tardiness – though he suspected the real reason was that he had stood up for a student organiser whom the authorities wanted rid of ...”

“... vices anglais – strikes, spanking and sodomy spring to mind – this seems on the surface to be unfair. Other societies have undoubtedly been as secretive. Soviet Russia, for example: I don’t suppose it was any easier to see your medical records there than it is here. But there are at least two British peculiarities. One is the depth of our ...”

“... On the way into Guatemala City from the airport on my first visit years ago, I was informed by the taxi-driver – who else? – of the death of the American Ambassador. It was August 1968, and John Gordon Mein had been assassinated that morning. This was an abrupt introduction to the complexities of Guatemalan politics, and I merely assumed – with the Vietnam War and the less-publicised Guatemalan guerrilla war of the Sixties well underway – that another imperial satrap had received his just deserts ...”

“... In a few weeks from now, Labour will have been in office for eight years, and we will be in the middle of an election campaign which seems certain to win it at least four more. The party’s record in government evokes a range of responses on the left – from mild gloom to clinical depression, from irritation to rage, from apathy to horror – but one of the most consistent things it provokes is disorientation ...”

“... was resurrected many years after the event. And perhaps she was right, though that cannot be the reason for their son, David Profumo, once more resurrecting it. Presumably he needed to get it out of his system. Whatever his reasons, he tries to discover in this well-crafted memoir, which is effectively a joint ...”

“... and a half earlier, Zef Kryeqyqe had shot Gjorg Berisha’s brother. That murder too was motivated by revenge: Gjorg Berisha’s brother had killed a member of Zef Kryeqyqe’s family. The Berishas and Kryerqyqes have been taking it in turns to murder one another for seventy years: 22 men from each family have been killed in the feud, and Gjorg will in due ...”

“... chasmic vowel, a playground for demons. Exactly when or why manuals for conjuring spirits came to be known by this name is unclear, but the convention was well established in Europe by the Middle Ages. ‘Grimoire’ is French for ‘grammary’, a book of grammar: it may have been ...”

“... There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new play by Shakespeare, that one can imagine.’ Brian Southam begins his Introduction to ‘Grandison’ by quoting the apparently prophetic observation of Margaret Drabble in 1974 ...”

“... above the law. This contempt towards one great limb of the British Constitution has been matched by the scorn it has shown towards another for which it has also affected respect. The Government’s cynical control of the Commons and its contemptuous disregard of the Lords have allowed it singlehandedly to turn Britain into the impoverished and unequal nation ...”

“... This article refers to a number of maps which are too detailed to be rendered readably on this website. They are available (via these links) as Acrobat PDF files. Map One shows the situation in Hebron now, with the Arab town dominated by Israeli settlements. Map Two follows the sequence of Israeli transfers of West Bank territory to Palestinian self-rule between 1994 and 1999 ...”

“... the Gulf, boots or no boots, his rhetoric at least is wearing steel toe caps. ‘We are going to be in the front line of this whatever happens,’ he told the Commons Liaison Committee, meaning not, as you might think, that we’re going to invade Iraq regardless of public opinion and even if the UN weapons inspectors don’t detect a material breach of ...”

“... closer – I had to use the OED – you find that the Latinate words are very purposefully derived by way of French: adjoindre is more common in French than its equivalent is in English; and ‘precision’, here, carries a meaning that is slightly less obsolete in French than it is in English, that of cutting off or trimming, making the sentence just ...”

“... The world is a complex place. That is a truism, but perhaps complexity can be investigated rather than taken for granted. Think of the sorts of causal interaction one might regard as ‘complex’. In 2002, Avshalom Caspi and collaborators published a widely reported study in which they concluded that the degree to which abuse in childhood increases the likelihood that men will exhibit antisocial behaviour later in life was partly dependent on the presence of a gene that appears to control the activity of an enzyme called monoamine oxydase A ...”

“... Who were you closest to as a child? How often do you phone your mum? What would you normally be doing at this moment, if you weren’t doing this? What do you do on your own in a hotel room? Why? Questions like this are what Lynn Barber uses to open up her celebrity interviews, and I think you can see why. They’re simple, direct, upfront and ...”