“... our estimation of past glories, the recent declension does not appear so humiliating; a wry balm may thus be found by deprecating our past. Moreover, if the 19th-century economic achievement is downgraded, so, too, must be the liberal economic philosophy to which so much credit for economic success used to be given. Such an argument suggests that in the ...”

“... a home so costly as to exceed easily imagined explanations? The astronomical price of the Van Gogh may have been an eccentricity, rather than a milestone in the inevitable ascent to the $100 million canvas, and the same may be said of the $17.5 for which the Johns was knocked down. Indeed, the giddiness which characterised ...”

“... of Ireland and America, for instance), and ignoring the old world of genteel trade courtesies. It may have emerged in tandem with the legally defensible intellectual property rights that came into being at the beginning of the 18th century, in response to a rapidly expanding readership and a culture of inventors eager to exploit commercial ...”

“... end of the sentence. According to Johnson, he was a remarkable instance of ‘how far impudence may carry ignorance’. Taylor himself – my John Taylor – later became oculist to George III, a job he shared with his brother. The post was unpaid and undemanding: though Taylor seems to have been a competent ophthalmologist in his twenties, by the time he ...”

“... last of the 19th-century great men’, but Debray will have none of it. Mitterrand himself may belong to the 19th century, he argues, but it’s more likely that de Gaulle ‘was really the first great man of the 21st century’. And his admiration does not stop there. There is the wonderful austerity of de Gaulle’s refusal to pander to the ...”

“... Bagehot undoubtedly was, thoroughly, professionally and ancestrally: a banker. His grandfather Robert Bagehot was a West Country merchant who shipped goods up the River Parrett under the name of the Somerset Trading Company. Robert’s younger son, Thomas, married the niece of Samuel Stuckey, the founder of Stuckey’s ...”

“... the rest of us. Certain writers’ books get ‘fenced off by enthusiasts, and the casual reader may feel the need of credentials to read them’. Between 1956 and 1981 Mary Renault published eight novels set in ancient Greece that made her enormously, wildly popular. These days, though she’s never been out of print – this is the second reissue of her ...”

“... McCarthy and facing dissent in his party, he became convinced he wasn’t going to win. Then Robert F. Kennedy, one of three main Democratic contenders (alongside McCarthy and the vice president, Hubert Humphrey), was assassinated, only two months after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. The former governor of Alabama George Wallace ran a ferocious ...”

“... their lives. In his literary notebook, he copied out sentences from G.K. Chesterton’s book about Robert Browning, published in 1903. Chesterton had written about ‘the terrible importance of detail’ that apparently possessed Browning in an almost demonic way: Any room that he was sitting in glared at him with innumerable eyes & mouths gaping with a story ...”

“... by a much more conservative figure as Khrushchev was before him, then Western disappointment may well mimic the previous disenchantment with détente. Conversely, if revolt were to break out in one of the countries of Eastern Europe which espouses glasnost too enthusiastically, the pressures on Gorbachev to intervene ...”

“... in the scene.’ Of Nimoy’s autobiography, though every bit as triumphalist as Nichols’s, one may say that there is a kind of failure built into it, for twenty years ago Nimoy produced a book called I Am Not Spock: now he knows on which side his bread is buttered. As with Nichols, however, the fictional character seems to have swallowed up the real ...”

“... On 21 May​  Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire after eleven days of fighting, but the days of ‘quiet’ – as the New York Times tellingly describes the last seven years, in which Israel intensified its domination over the Palestinians with impunity – are over. Dead, too, is Trump’s plan to bypass the Palestinian question through ‘normalisation’ between Israel and Arab autocrats keen to do business with the Jewish state (and to buy its surveillance technology to monitor their own dissidents ...”

“... contracts worth $3.5 million. Bloom appears to be a small-time wheeler-dealer. More interesting is Robert Stein, his alleged co-conspirator, who was the CPA’s Comptroller and Funding Officer for the South-Central region. Stein has been convicted of fraud and sued for embezzlement in previous business dealings with the US military in the States. He is a ...”

“... month I was granted British citizenship and I very much love this country. Possibly I may die, but I will die as a free person, and my son and wife are free people. And Britain is a great country.’ Litvinenko died four days later, on 23 November 2006. Six hours before it happened Scotland Yard got a phone call from the Atomic Weapons ...”

“... The British Army occupied Jerusalem on Sunday, 9 December 1917, and withdrew on 14 May 1948. During its brief imperium in the Promised Land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, ‘to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people ...”