“... that he was one of them. Yet, surely, he was from boyhood a wandering, adventurous, hard-reading intellectual, eager for fame and the company of the powerful, a roving reporter and a risk-loving political agitator. Rural Rides, his most popular book, has solidified his reputation as a rustic. But 60-year-old peasants don’t go rushing around the ...”

“... and asked that his prize possession, his furred robes, be placed at the altar of the Church of St Peter in Louvain. To posterity, the awesome contemporary reputation of Lipsius’s writing may seem curiously inflated. The admiration aroused by his textual work was often uncritical. His philosophical treatises strung together Classical texts much as Protestant ...”

“... of great letter-writers. The most interesting are not the ones written to his brother from the Peter and Paul Fortress describing his mock-execution and pardon, about which he made little at the time, or the account he later gave his brother of his time in penal servitude. These things were all to be written up later by the novelist. Unlike ...”

“... mental or physical exercise of almost any kind. Two inspirational teachers gave him a love of reading and, more excessively, of animal life. Philip Hobsbaum, who in his later academic career encouraged many writers, including Seamus Heaney and Alasdair Gray, got him to read Nineteen Eighty-Four, which Livingstone reckons influenced his political beliefs ...”

“... But it would take a writer of rare skill – which Nguyen is not – to make it compelling reading. I once knew someone who competed in national fireworks championships, which turn out to involve all sorts of arcane rules to help determine who is best at lighting up the night sky. The YouTube channel to which he directed me so I could watch his ...”

“... as the CIA’s private venture capital firm. One of Palantir’s founders, the billionaire Peter Thiel, described Christopher Columbus as ‘the first multiculturalist’, accused Aimé Césaire of not understanding the transcendental value of The Tempest and advocates for cyberspace, outer space and sea-steading as routes of escape from ‘the ...”

“... irrelevance) of constitutional reform as an issue during it. This part of the book is like reading a bunch of Sunday newspaper articles – which would not matter too much if there were some deeper structure, but there is little or nothing in an analytical vein. Barnett takes us back to the recent past, not to explain it but rather to relive and (he ...”

“... his retirement without his having agreed to it – but Prisongate will make uncomfortable reading for ministers. It is a vivid and at times idiosyncratic account expressive in equal measure of personal frustration and moral outrage. Despite differences in tone and style, the book has striking parallels with Lewis’s. Both men were outsiders to the ...”

“... But then, noticing a fire fed by two peasant women, he approaches and tells them the story of St Peter, also seeking warmth on a bitter night; they break down and weep at Peter’s denial of Christ and Peter’s own tears at his betrayal. What had occurred in Palestine 19 centuries ...”

“... the United States and Israel), which takes up almost half the book, should be compulsory reading for everyone who has ever expressed an opinion on the subject. Yuri Slezkine dedicates the book to his grandmother: not the Russian noblewoman who, despite having ‘lost everything she owned in the Revolution’, ‘at the end of her life … was a loyal ...”

“... shadow chancellor, after an alleged leak of sensitive information had impugned the probity of both Peter Thorneycroft, the chancellor of the exchequer, and Oliver Poole, the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, ‘with his vast City interests’. Poole naturally insisted that his name be cleared, and the resulting Bank Rate Tribunal found that there was ...”

“... For the last six months, a Scot reading the London papers, or watching London-made political TV shows, could only conclude that a sharp dislike of Scots and Scotland is spreading across South Britain. The reports suggest a bout of Scotophobia without parallel since the violently anti-Scottish mood of the English mob in Lord Bute’s day ...”

“... does it mean for you?”’ This risks an interpretative solipsism, even if ‘curative reading’ is meant to be ‘a collaborative process’, and Bucknell ends with a glance towards ‘online technologies’ and ‘personal anthologies’ culled from the web in acts of ‘self-curation.’ Other books, such as Can Poetry Save the Earth?, Earth ...”

“... were another important influence. The first half of the Key of Solomon makes for thrilling reading, in part because the intensity of the ritual increases dramatically with each attempt at summoning. The magician is instructed to stand at the centre of his laboriously prepared magic circle and recite the first conjuration. If nothing happens, the ...”

“... the establishment even more than the monarchy. By printing what the rest of the world was already reading, the Week became indispensable during the idiotic weeks when the British press was gagging itself and pretending it had never heard of Mrs Simpson. Lord Mountbatten, who shared Cockburn’s contempt for Baldwin’s politics, apparently urged the king to ...”