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“... which has recently been brilliantly treated in a collection of essays edited by Jenny Doctor, David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon.* In terms (for instance) of its performing space, the crucial dates were 1893 and 1941 (when the Queen’s Hall was destroyed and the concerts moved to the Albert Hall); in terms of sponsorship and organisation, the key years ...”

“... considerations of national security’. Knowing as we do that ‘overriding’ here means that considerations so labelled cannot on security grounds be shared with the public – or even, given Blair’s record in these matters, with other members of the government – we have good reason to see this quite dreadful prospect or else intention as ...”

“... Bunter’s to run headlong into things, with preposterously beneficial results for all concerned. David Hughes, in his latest novel, takes this trait and turns it on its head: the outcome of Bunter’s intervention in certain notable episodes of the 20th century is very serious indeed. By this account, Bunter is personally responsible for the arrest of ...”

“... is how these are dealt with. The way to deal with them is to take responsibility for them, which means neither denying them nor wallowing in them, but accepting them for what they are: the unintended but foreseeable consequences of any involvement in politics. All politicians with real power have dirty hands, because real politics is a bloody business. The ...”

“... Why start now? If you find that the words start to flow you’ll feel like an idiot, because that means you could have done it long ago and spared yourself a lot of grief. Displacement activities abound, fuelled by the lingering fear that it may already be too late. What if you write the book and it’s no good, or at least not good enough to rescue your ...”

“... better. This does not mean that schools and hospitals should try to be more like supermarkets. It means that they are very different from supermarkets, and that customer choice will not drive progress if the choices are not meaningful ones. Hospital food offers patients two kinds of choice: either to select from a range of options set by a budget they do not ...”

“... I am reliably informed, for instance, that practising Polish Catholics resort to abortion as a means of birth control on a large scale. The state, though officially in favour of contraception, does not ensure the availability of contraceptives – the pill is particularly difficult to obtain – but does provide abortion on demand. It is possible that this ...”

“... by developing countries ashamed of their backwardness compared to a West that begrudged them the means to compete. In the aftermath of the Indian nuclear test, State Department officials noted that developing countries, many of them India’s rivals, ‘quietly welcomed the Indian demonstration that one of their number could accomplish a technical ...”

“... as they take what they are doing seriously. This doesn’t mean they can’t be funny; it just means they have to be serious about what’s funny on the radio. Moyles puts it like this: I FUCKING LOVE GREAT RADIO! I really do. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t love all radio. But it’s fair to say that when it’s done properly I love it … Now let me tell ...”

“... things done. And that, of course, just makes things worse, because cutting through the crap also means ignoring the checks and balances that stop the system from blowing up. The result is ‘pluto-populism’. Or to give it another name: Trump.What to do? Wolf’s answer is deceptively simple, though it has many moving parts. The epigraph for his book comes ...”

“... Latin America to the Ottoman Empire to China, in which Europe and the US interfered – whether by means of force or intrusive economic ‘meddling’ – to promote their own interests. Sometimes this involved coercion of the reluctant and uncooperative: Britain fought the two Opium Wars in part to compel China to participate in ‘free trade’. As Western ...”

“... been reading Arnold Bennett, the prolific Edwardian chronicler of lives in gradual but by no means uneventful decline: ‘declension’, Bennett called it, with a nod to the term’s grammatical sense, as though to indicate that steady failure can serve as well as spectacular reversals of fortune to bring out the variation in the forms a life might ...”

“... corrections – once considered the epitome of progressive sanctions – were reinterpreted as means whereby the normalising gaze of the authorities could be extended into the homes of deviants and non-deviants alike, while the reformers’ ideal of a rehabilitative prison was depicted as an Orwellian nightmare of surveillance, discipline and ...”

“... has stayed dead. The GDR was never, as some liked to believe, the continuation of Prussia by other means. Junker estates were broken up, and Prussia was distributed among the Poles and Russians as well as the Germans. Recent events are unlikely to change any of that. Restitution of property almost certainly does not apply to the former estates, and the ...”

“... a widely recognised public figure. Immobile for decades, he is now unable to communicate except by means of an electronic voice-synthesiser connected to a word-processor. He suffers from what is variously known as motor neurone disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, but despite his confinement has moved into the vanguard of ...”