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“... the new regime, Margaret’s Foreign Secretary. He is now the Secretary-General of Nato. Five major posts and still a failure? We should first examine Dr Cosgrave. I wrote earlier that the author had been both within and without the Conservative Party, first as a functionary employed in the Research Department of Conservative Central Office, and later, in ...”

“... The collection edited by Peter Quennell has some attractive photographs and two good essays, by John Bayley and Martin Amis. For the rest, there is a lot of laborious exegesis, which might have amused the recipient of the tribute, and a thought-provoking piece by Alfred Appel Jr, who knew Nabokov well and is steeped in his work. The thought provoked is that ...”

“... avenue of outrageousness in considering Hollywood films in the light, from time to time, of major works of thought’. But philosophy itself is outrageous, ‘inherently so’. ‘It seeks to disquiet the foundation of our lives and to offer us in recompense nothing better than itself.’ And nothing is more outrageous than the philosophy of the ...”

“... that a work is in sonata form. Indeed, I know nothing of music except being able to play the major and minor diatonic scales more or less accurately. What good that does me I have never understood. My musical education started quite abruptly when I went to Vienna in 1928 and attended concerts at least once a week during the two years I was ...”

“... immunity. It’s very early days to assess the extent to which it escapes, but it would be a major surprise if it wasn’t substantially less well neutralised by antibodies generated by the vaccines. Researchers (including the team I work with at the Crick Institute) are rushing to quantify this. The first studies may report in a matter of days, and we ...”

“... Mexico. The pieces can be juggled almost at random. Still, the apparent evacuation of Syria was major news, and it hogged the headlines very satisfactorily. It was, he said on Twitter, ‘time for us to get out’ and let others ‘figure the situation out’. Believers might see this as a first step in Trump’s design – announced in the 2016 campaign ...”

“... myths, and is temperamentally a northern island or isthmus dweller. In that respect he’s like John Burnside, to whom he dedicated his best poem so far, ‘At Roane Head’ (LRB, 14 August 2008), in which there is not just a selkie at the bottom of the garden but there might be a selkie in the bedroom that could cuckold you, or make you kill your children ...”

“... liberation. Despite this, Garvey was taken up by the religion as a divinely inspired prophet, the John the Baptist of Rastafari. By 1940, he too was in England. Haile Selassie declined an invitation to meet him. Garvey died that year, a fact that many of his unwanted followers refused to believe, and since Haile Selassie’s reported demise in 1975 his own ...”

“... the skills she had developed in earlier work on coal. Subsequently, the director of the unit, John Randall, decided to hand over to her the project that Maurice Wilkins, aided by Raymond Gosling, a doctoral student, had begun – the structural analysis of DNA. Wilkins learned of this only when he returned from overseas to find that his project had been ...”

“... for small reward he was teaching me geography in Edinburgh) and Robin Robertson, or the Irishman John F. Deane, or now the American Patty Crane. They were drawn by the small vocabulary, the short sentences, the largely transferable word-order, the language that seems to pay twenty shillings to the pound – darkness, stone, light, tree, cold. You feel the ...”

“... There were, it turned out, intimate connections between the Abu Ghraib scandal and the Rasul case: Major General Geoffrey Miller, for example, the architect of Guantanamo, also helped to shape procedures at the various detention and interrogation facilities in Iraq. More generally, Abu Ghraib served as a window, one of the few we have had so far, into the ...”

“... and Expressionism; in the readymade and in Dada’s exploitation of industrial raw materials (John Heartfield’s political photomontages would have been impossible without collage); and even Abstract Expressionism (as Clement Greenberg argued, the little pockets of ‘depth’ that pucker the surfaces of Cubist paintings presage the hills and crannies in ...”

“... bouts of illness, contributing to the dispatch and defeat of a British force at Coruña under Sir John Moore. Canning genuinely believed that the war would be lost unless Castlereagh was removed. He was generally supported in this view but was balked by the indecisiveness of the prime minister, the 71-year-old Duke of Portland, a favourite of George III. This ...”

“... among the English middle classes, the early 20th century was a more genteel time than the 1750s. John Somerville, a youngish English archaeologist, digging in Mesopotamia in the spring of 1914, thinks he may have discovered evidence that would definitively resolve a number of uncertainties in the history of the late Assyrian Empire. Since those uncertainties ...”

“... was a pioneer of legal simplification, mixed polities and defence of civil liberties, and a major influence upon the American constitution. His views on penology were far more lenient and humane than those of Bentham himself; and his famous remark, ‘everything is now as it should be,’ is shown to have referred, not, as Bentham implied, to the ...”