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“... also found the film troubling because of its very glossiness, and troubling in ways I didn’t at first understand. It’s not that it isn’t accurate, or that it oversimplifies history. In certain respects the film is fanatically accurate, full of the exact looks of old icons, minutely close to many of the marvellous photographs collected in the ...”

“... demand which he makes of a theory of individuation is that it ‘comprise at least three things: first, an elucidation of the primitive concept of identity as sameness; second, some however abstract account of what it is for something to be a substance that persists through change; and third, (supervening in [his] treatment upon the ...”

“... Seventies, who have only ever been aware of a Tory government, and who are about to vote for the first time; those disengaged from the world of party politics since 1989, when they fell off the electoral register rather than pay the cruel levy of the Poll Tax. That drug-taking, hedonistic, supposedly apathetic generation is being fiercely wooed by a new ...”

“... By the same token, judicial retirements are of great political moment. Obama tried to nudge Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire in 2013, when the Democrats still held the Senate; his efforts were rebuffed. Then, in February 2016, Scalia died when the Senate was controlled by Republicans, who refused to hold hearings on Obama’s nominee. The consequences have ...”

“... complex and vulnerable, yet in natural harmony with the fabulous elements in the tale. In the first volume of the series, Master and Commander, he meets up with a young Naval officer, Jack Aubrey, when the two discover a mutual passion for Boccherini, and a pleasure in playing him together on violin and viola. The partnership continues throughout the ...”

“... and the Sunday papers run their Books of the Year columns, to find that no one yet has singled out Ruth Dudley Edwards’s marvellous biography of Victor Gollancz. The book is full of wonders, but the chief impression it left on me was the dynamism and energy of the man during times which seemed altogether gloomy for someone of his radical and optimistic ...”

“... In 1926, his demons returned. He became obsessed about his appearance, and one day rushed into Ruth Mack Brunswick’s consulting-room, shouting and holding a mirror to his nose. She diagnosed paranoia. The Wolf-Man knew immediately what that meant: Uncle Peter. He had abandoned his mansion, set up a tent in a secluded field on his estate and had lived ...”

“... to St Francis of Assisi that Margaret Thatcher quoted on the steps of 10 Downing Street on her first day as prime minister, 4 May 1979: ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.’ Thatcher had just called on the queen and no doubt wrote the words as an aide-memoire on the short drive back through St James Park from Buckingham Palace. It is as if on ...”

“... wants to rescue Mead. His book portrays her as one of the more sympathetic US internationalists. First, she got Americans interested in the far corners of the globe in the early 1940s when, in Mandler’s view, many were inclined to turn their backs. Second, she championed a postwar international order that would make the world ‘safe for ...”

“... causing her to miscarry. But she had been unsure about the pregnancy, even though it was not her first. ‘When I began to know that I was pregnant, I had my midwife Dianora, who has [helped] deliver my other children, come and I told her I wondered whether I was pregnant and she looked at me and said I was and from that point I began to grow.’ Pregnancy ...”

“... spread like Alpine plants over the rock-like social assurance of its betters. At the end of this first volume the hero is still under thirty, with a long and droll career, presumably at least as well documented, still before him. Long biographies are in fashion, and the serious case for this one must be that Betjeman’s influence on insular taste really has ...”

“... fair to Graves, from whom we get two untypical letters – one to Alan Sillitoe, the other to Ruth Fainlight – of the sort that we might expect from a master instructing neophytes. To Sillitoe for example, in 1954: Your poem sounds good, holds together well, but the language has been taken a stage beyond common sense, and that I always regret. A poem ...”

“... and successful call-girls), but’ are vividly informative. This is what I have learned from them. First, how it all starts: usually little by little, not difficult to imagine (‘each time I realised that it was really impossible to stop. Yet it wasn’t because I didn’t want to. I did, from the start’). Only one out of the six set out with any ...”

“... when he went up to Cambridge in 1938, he intended to become a medical missionary, and met his first wife, Ruth Harris, at Congsoc (the University Congregational Society). Soon she was ‘washing his test tubes’ and they were tacitly engaged, though they wouldn’t have sex until 1943, when they got married.Early in ...”

“... and it is here that the most uninhibited comedy is to be found. The high point is the career of Ruth, the plain, solid girl who became a nun. Even she gets restless, and is sent by her order to America, where for a spell she pursues her vocation among encounter groups, rock masses, charismatic prayer meetings and all the Southern Californian varieties of ...”