“... a proper word for it. And there was no such thing as Austria, either.’ I thought of Musil when I read a passage from Keith Ajegbo’s recent Diversity and Citizenship report. The investigator was talking to a little seven-year-old, who was the only English child in her class. After all the others had talked about their origins, she said sadly: ‘I come from ...”

“... to abuse their position of spiritual authority by getting hold of grimoires (which they could now read) and charging parishioners for extra services involving the conjuration of spirits.Rates of education among the rest of society improved during the same period, in tandem with the rise of print. Many of the ‘cunning folk’, rural practitioners of ...”

“... the editor of the Times, soon realised what a talent they had hired: Cockburn had long since read and absorbed almost the entire body of English literature, emerging as a wonderfully fluent and vivid writer. But his salary didn’t come close to paying for his untidy, riotous life in a huge Kurfürstendamm flat, and it wasn’t until 1929 that Dawson ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy ...”

“... scene off by heart, as do several of the others. This is new, as actors would normally expect to read the scene and if they are bad readers, as many actors are, this would have to be discounted when assessing their ability. Nowadays because competition is so fierce actors come knowing the audition scene by heart and so it’s much easier to gauge what they ...”

“... You must leave life for that. No But always to preserve the adventive Minute … I’m tempted to read ‘you must leave life for that’ as meaning we must leave such things to life itself; but that is not what the phrase says. Durrell’s Quartet is an attempt at a masterpiece of size (and shape and time), but he didn’t leave life for it. He stayed with ...”

“... in the spectacular understatement of the secret government report on nuclear war of 1955 quoted by Peter Hennessy (‘whether this country could withstand an all-out attack and still be in a state to carry on hostilities must be very doubtful’). To expect to die in the next war, as my contemporaries not unreasonably did in 1939 – Overy quotes my own ...”

“... by someone ostensibly outside its world. Selznick was uneasy about the story’s aptness to be read as a white parable of the essential goodness of the slave-owning South. The film tries its best to alleviate the tacit racism, banning the word ‘nigger’ and repressing direct mention of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet the real world would draw out the story’s ...”

“... of Jeremy Bentham’s all-seeing ‘panopticon’. That seems apt: it allows the government to read and hear almost every message that passes between us. In his new history of GCHQ Richard Aldrich claims that this surveillance capability constitutes potentially ‘the most insidious threat to personal liberty’ we face today. Bentham’s panopticon was a ...”

“... and his world. Indeed, to get inside the mind of Mithridates one can still do worse than read a fictional reconstruction of his greatest enemy’s memoirs: Peter Green’s Sword of Pleasure inhabits Cornelius Sulla’s patrician Roman mind in all its brilliant, terrible logic. In so doing, and freed from the ...”

“... not so sure Cronenberg’s filmic output is equal to that of Jean Cocteau, Marguerite Duras or Peter Handke. Part of the problem with creative polymaths is that on exposure to their work in a new medium the viewer, reader or listener can’t help assessing the extent to which their style and methodology has been directly transposed. Cronenberg seems to ...”

“... see them, and burying a Kant or a Schopenhauer somewhere in the middle, where no one will ever read them, and regularly lugging the odd copy of something home with him in a briefcase, where he has nightmares of being squashed flat in his bed or on the can by the dead weight of accumulated books plunging through his shelves, and dreams of buying up his ...”

“... election, lent her approval to the conspiracy theory of the ‘grand remplacement’ of real (read: Christian) Europeans by Muslims. Since then, Swedish conservatives have lifted the cordon sanitaire, forming a coalition that includes the Sweden Democrats. And in Italy, the far right has won on its own.Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, one of the ...”

“... Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, Times Higher Education asked the former Cambridge vice-chancellor Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, who ran the government’s University Grants Committee in the 1980s, about her approach. ‘The instinct of a woman is to spring-clean,’ he said, ‘and this country needed spring-cleaning, not least the university ...”

“... second has been something of a mystery until now. In January 1958 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft, resigned in protest at the growth of public expenditure. In a successful disinformation campaign it was put about that he had resigned in dispute over some relatively trifling sum. But as the files reveal, Thorneycroft had been raising ...”