“... of lawfare into the justice department. Compared to that, what’s a little bit of graft? He may be right that what was meant by corruption in the 19th century doesn’t worry people so much in the 21st, at least when compared to what else is going on. After all, it’s not as though Zuckerberg and Bezos need any more money, even if they seem slavishly ...”

“... prominent, except in the world of ballet, than the much larger post-1917 Russian emigration. They may have made little impact on the old entrenched professions – medicine, law – but their impact on more open fields, and eventually on science and public life, was quite remarkable. In Britain émigrés transformed art history and visual culture, as well as ...”

“... for Your Home’ on Netflix.I still light our stove, though not without misgivings. I may upgrade to a more efficient model and will switch on the PM 2.5 sensor to test the difference, though really it’s just an amulet, safeguarding the future while the sparks ...”

“... have definitive information, it is thought that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed may have been held in a prison built on the island in 1984. We do know that the anti-Gaddafi guerrilla leader and politician Abdelhakim Belhaj and his wife, Fatima Boudchar, were arrested in Malaysia in 2004 and rendered from a black site in Thailand via Diego ...”

“... for all the fearmongering about antifa (as if to be anti-fascist was a bad thing), anarchism may be another arena where the right has largely muscled out the left. The battle cry of Steve Bannon and gang in 2016, ‘Deconstruct the administrative state,’ is a nasty détournement of the renewed wish of the New Left in the 1960s to smash the ...”

“... allowed to fail. There is a strong sense throughout the novel that Wallace’s self-hatred may drag him under. He speaks of dead leaves rotting in black water. He can’t swim, certainly not in a cold lake ‘at some slim, dark hour’. He climbs onto the roof, alone, at night. We’re used to queer characters, especially black queer characters, not ...”

“... an appearance that sits ill with his output of works on philosophy and his love of music. There may be something telling in Aubrey’s note that Bacon ‘had a delicate, lively hazel eye; Dr Harvey told me it was like the eye of a viper.’ Yet Aubrey asserts that Bacon was envied by Coke. His Essaies acquired and maintained an almost oracular status. The ...”

“... to remove in the usual violent ways – gin, a scalding bath, a wire coathanger – for fear they may leave traces on her body. ‘Everyone would know what had happened, and what was driving her was the need for privacy. What was driving her was the need for no other person on earth to ever find out what was taking place inside her body.’Nolan ...”

“... for evil. Evil, James writes, is a concept invented to describe ‘elements of the universe which may make no rational whole in conjunction with the other elements’ and which ‘can only be considered so much irrelevance and accident – so much “dirt” as it were, and matter out of place’. At the sorting centre, I’d watched a large, ornate Bible ...”

“... to hear Smith’s request for rapid resolution of the immunity question. As a result, the case may not be heard till after the election. Trump again benefits here from the law’s generous provision of liberal rights of process.Although Trump complains about the political nature of the indictments, he has profited both from the politicisation of the ...”

“... paid for by the same desperate people they were intended to help? The Sanità’s intentions may have been virtuous, but they were nevertheless shaped by an intractable perception of the poor as thoughtless and lazy, opportunists who took advantage of the state of emergency.Early modern historians used to be interested in the idea of the ‘world turned ...”

“... Judith Shakespeare and, if so, on what grounds? The family has no record of any claims she may have made about its provenance; if she did believe it to be genuine, it is possible that this belief was communicated to her by spirit guides tapping on tables. It might be more apt, though, to imagine Corelli conferring this name on the girl with the pear as ...”

“... The knights’ determination to defend a barren island they had never wanted to occupy may seem irrational, yet their actions were not only suicidally brave but perfectly sensible; a not unknown combination in human carry-on. Crazy, yes, but lucky? I don’t think so.They stayed on Malta for another two centuries, until Napoleon threw them out in ...”

“... bothered about ‘well-formed syntax, conventions of punctuation or elegance of vocabulary’. She may not always understand her emotions, but she is direct about them: ‘Have I always been afraid? Was fear transferred to me when I was in the womb … ? Mamma was always afraid. And me?’ Real and fictional examples of violent or dark relationships ...”