“... some notable way’. Yet people who are like me in one notable way (politics, or taste in music) may not be like me in another (age, education, skin colour, income or – especially – location). Tastes correlate with all those other variables – as Pierre Bourdieu never tired of showing – but their correlation is less than perfect: otherwise critics ...”

“... of trees, shrubs, water, meadows, cottages, and houses; what is commonly called Views. These … may delight the owner of the acres they enclose, the inhabitants of the spot, perhaps the antiquary or the traveller, but to every other eye they are little more than topography. The landscape of Titian, of Mola, of Salvator, of the ...”

“... of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.’ The problems, the struggles and ultimately the tragedy all lay in the second half of the article: what was an abuse and ...”

“... will suffer, or flee. Refusing to wade into a fight between a bunch of strangers is sensible, and may be to their benefit in the long term, but it is closer to selfishness than kindness. The weakest element of Jeremy Corbyn’s argument against bombing (by not enacting any precursor, but simply being himself and saying what he thinks, Corbyn is taking the ...”

“... to documents had diminished his value to Moscow. Why MI6 used him remains an open question. It may be that both London and Elliott genuinely believed he was innocent and that he was too valuable a resource to leave unused. But in 1956, MI6 acquired a new chief, Dick White, who had long suspected that Philby was playing a double game. It’s possible that ...”

“... required obedience and conformity in public, putting in an appearance with office colleagues on May Day for the parade or avoiding critical remarks about the Soviet Union in the bus queue. But once home, your private life – boring, alcoholic, even bourgeois – was your own affair. To call such regimes totalitarian seems far-fetched; their degree of ...”

“... thing to do – Judeo/Christian principles – You are not a murderer – Sanctity of life – He may listen to reason – Post-traumatic stress – Won’t be able to live with yourself – Murder is wrong! Under the heading ‘Kill Him’ there is only one entry: – He’ll kill your entire family if you let him go. It isn’t immediately obvious that ...”

“... is multiple choice.’ ‘Now he supports the minimum wage. If we give him two more weeks he may even vote for me.’ Michelle Obama is currently the most popular political figure in America, with an approval rating of 66 per cent. Her politics consist of showing obese children how to exercise, coming to the aid of veterans’ families, and loving her ...”

“... it to her classmates herself. Encouraged by her mother, who changed her own middle name from May to Marguerite because it was ‘more sophisticated’, Angela Yvonne Davis was fluent enough at 17 to try it out in the real world: she and her sister went to a shoe shop in Birmingham, Alabama and pretended they were French. The clerks were having trouble ...”

“... Peterschule, where instruction was in German, Kharms was also fluent in English; his anglophilia may explain the pseudonym he adopted in 1924, which echoes the Cyrillic transcription of Sherlock Holmes’s surname. But, much like Kharms himself, the name is an idiosyncratic one-off, unplaceable within any obvious frame of reference, except perhaps some ...”

“... to scare the Soviets into thinking that Nixon was ‘mad’ enough to start an atomic war. Reagan may have doubted his anti-Communist credentials, but Kissinger quickly accommodated himself to the New Right. ‘We all now turn to Ronald Reagan as the trustee of our hopes,’ he told the crowd at the 1980 nominating convention, which held him in only slightly ...”

“... of Moorehead’s book reads like a long epilogue, though some readers – women especially – may find it the more affecting. Gellhorn never gave up. She drove herself into brick walls searching for a balance between love and independence, society and solitude, outwardness and inwardness, and was beset by a profoundly American indecision between the road ...”

“... little time for preparation as possible. In the event he was arrested on a Saturday afternoon in May for trial the following Monday. In the Court of King’s Bench, the attorney-general read out the charge contained in the information. Hone asked for a copy of the charges against him, but was refused one unless he was willing to pay to have the information ...”

“... had started out by splitting rails – could rise to independence, success and wealth. Lincoln may have been peddling a myth, Sandage observes, but no nation ever came closer to realising it than the United States in the first half of the 19th century. Vast open lands (open, that is, once the natives had been pushed off) offered extraordinary opportunities ...”

“... the battle, Tasso the poet of fear and the poet who feels fear recognises that his superhero may be about to fall prey to anger and a mass of pagan frailties. He fades out the fight with: ‘I cannot speak of every fearsome thing/ then done, which darkness hid from human eyes.’ This is the reason Tasso is out of favour: he sets up an opposition, blurs ...”