“... footing about the end of the 17th century: as small a regular army as was indispensable, paid for by annual vote of the House of Commons, and an officer corps drawn so largely from the same class of gentlemen as filled Parliament as to be untroubled by its obligation to obey the civil ...”

“... work has a cracker-barrel quality to it, as when he illustrates the conflict between body and mind by pointing out that people find it hard to walk and talk at the same time. He regarded Hegel as a supreme charlatan, and in a fit of masochism chose to hold his lectures at the University of Berlin at the same hour as the great man, ending up with an audience of ...”

“... Every November, the books pages of British newspapers perform what ought to be a helpful service: they present lists of the best books of the year, to remind us of what we missed. It’s part of the general round of year-end round-ups – 2008’s most significant moments in politics, art, sport, cinema, crime – but it always happens that the annual filing from the world of books is got out of the way early, in order to make room for the acres of larger cultural reflection that mark the actual transition from year X to year Y ...”

“... music you find especially disagreeable is piped into the room at a volume so piercing it seems to be throbbing inside you. You might call this excruciating. Now imagine the music on a round-the-clock loop, with no indication of when or whether it will stop, and no escape. You might call this torture. That’s how Binyam Mohamed spent his time in the secret ...”

“... A spouse used to be considered an indispensable asset for a politician; but then not so long ago bank shares looked like a good investment. For the moment the most notorious of the sub-prime other halves remains Richard Timney, husband and parliamentary aide to the home secretary. On the London Review blog last month Jenny Diski wrote that for the MPs involved, the expenses scandal is ‘like being a grown-up caught picking your nose and eating it ...”

“... order to defeat the Labour Party. They demanded, and received, a promise that an Arab school would be built in Upper Nazareth. The mayor is nonetheless committed to the ‘Judaisation’ – i.e. the de-Arabisation – of his city, and Liberman declared in August that stopping the immigration of Arabs into Nazareth, as he calls it, is a national priority. The ...”

“... left the UK to join Isis in 2013. They were killed instantly. If this had been America, it would be just another small strike in a long war against militants who were possibly – but not demonstrably – plotting attacks on the allies’ home soil. But the British are more fastidious, and cautious with their money, and this was the first time that a ...”

“... been adopted. Suddenly we had a ‘constitutional crisis’ provoked, according to the Daily Mail, by ‘egos in ermine who gave two fingers to democracy’. In an allusion to the 1909 People’s Budget crisis, the Tory MP Edward Leigh claimed that ‘not for a hundred years has the House of Lords defied this elected House.’ This claim was trumped ...”

“... Art Gallery works in favour of the current exhibition. Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers, curated by the English photographer Martin Parr, is made up of around 250 works by 23 photographers who came to Britain for long and short periods between the ...”

“... the most evocative objects in Ocean Liners (at the V&A until 17 June) is a diamond and pearl tiara by Cartier. Not particularly spectacular as Cartier tiaras go, it was once the property of Lady Marguerite Allan, who took it with her when she sailed from New York on 1 May 1915 on board the Lusitania. Six days later, off the Irish coast, a German U-boat ...”

“... The first rule when concocting a conspiracy theory is not to make any claims that can be proved not to be true. It won’t do, for example, to assert that John Kennedy was shot by Jackie Kennedy, because it’s clear from the film footage of the assassination that he wasn’t ...”

“... of the year; U is the 21st letter of the alphabet). Brown and his colleagues, Chad Trujillo and David Rabinowitz, have submitted a name to the International Astronomical Union, but it will remain secret until it gets the IAU’s stamp of approval. Unofficially, they’re calling it ‘Xena’, after the character played ...”

“... Most of these elements have been given shows of their own.So they set out to renew the genre by suggesting that you look closer: that you look at the paintings as things; that you think about the paint itself and about the rough, direct, sketchy dabs and flicks with which it is put on the canvas; that you notice the rhythms – swirling or staccato ...”

“... By now everyone must know the deal: if 75 per cent of people who download the monthly installments of Stephen King’s ‘new’ online novel, The Plant, pay for it, he’ll keep on churning it out. Addressing visitors to his website as ‘my friends’, he urges them to ‘Remember: Pay and the story rolls. Steal and the story folds ...”

“... Shakespearean tragedy, they were doing it in drag. I had been inspired, if that’s the word, by seeing the play at Basingstoke’s Haymarket Theatre, which recently lost its Arts Council grant and has closed down. I remember very little about the production except that the actors were wearing heavy woollen costumes, which were no doubt suitable garb for ...”