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“... the notion that some themes are ‘higher’ than others. There is a linguistic context too: thus Michael Hofmann, introducing his translation of Metamorphosis, quotes Klaus Wagenbach to the effect that ‘the characteristic purity of Kafka, the sober construction of his sentences and the paucity of his vocabulary are not understandable without his background ...”

“... a friend sneaked me into the Unprofor headquarters in a villa in the centre of town. General Michael Rose was away in Pale, we were told, negotiating with the Serbs. We were shown into a bedroom, now used as Rose’s private office. A Royal Marine sat back in the general’s chair, feet on the desk, his head hidden behind a thick book. The book was ...”

“... Profonde Albertine’, the narrator writes close to the end of Proust’s novel. By ‘deep’ – profonde – he means ‘unreachable’. She was mostly that when she was alive, and has assumed this quality as a permanent attribute now that she is dead. But he can still be tortured by his memories of all he didn’t know, for a while at least: ‘For, after death, Time leaves the body, and the memories … are effaced from her who no longer exists and soon will be from him whom at present they still torture ...”

“... Michael Polanyi lives on in the footnotes. If you want to invoke the idea of ‘tacit knowledge’, Polanyi is your reference of choice. You’ll probably cite his major book Personal Knowledge (1958), maybe the earlier Science, Faith and Society (1946), maybe the later The Tacit Dimension (1966). ‘We know more than we can tell’ was Polanyi’s dictum ...”

“... elected mayor equivalent to the leader of a council. Those arguing for an executive mayor included Michael Heseltine (the hammer of the GLC), the Evening Standard and Simon Jenkins, a long-standing critic of London council bungling. Opposition to the idea was led by Labour’s Environment spokesman, the former Camden councillor Frank Dobson – an irony not ...”

“... by the consequences of such assistance. The North Korean scenario is familiar. Critics of what Michael Ignatieff has described as ‘a vast, unruly humanitarian bazaar,’ are quick to point out that money is one of North Korea’s main attractions for relief agencies. Famine is a ‘growth opportunity’, Michael Maren ...”

“... remember us watching at home was England v. Argentina in the 1998 World Cup – the match in which Michael Owen scored that goal and David Beckham was shown that effigy-birthing red card. It was at McDonald’s that I was introduced to tactical discourse and talk of transfer windows; to the idea that a player being sold by a club for millions of pounds could ...”

“... rule even the most nominal privacy protections.By the late 2010s, as the sociologist Yagil Levy writes in Shooting and Not Crying, published in Hebrew last year, killing had become the principal metric of military efficacy. Operational success was measured by the number of targets generated and the percentage of assassinations carried out. ‘There was ...”

“... A diary, Roland Barthes suggested, provokes in its writer not the tragic question, ‘Who am I?’ but the comic question: ‘Am I?’ This elegant and amused remark goes some way towards explaining why Barthes, who reflected much on his life and published a book called Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, should not have kept a diary. The comic question can’t be confronted, it can only be circumvented, played with, smiled at ...”

“... John Stevas did a disservice by exaggerating their likely role. This enabled traditionalists like Michael Foot and Enoch Powell to warn that expanding the role of the committees might distract attention from the proper Parliamentary forum, the floor of the House. On their view, this would damage the position of individual members and of Parliament ...”

“... The subject thus had a discreditable aura from the outset. There is something distasteful to the Michael Oakeshotts and Norman Tebbits of this world in claiming that one’s own culture can be as dispassionately dissected as someone else’s. It is also bad news for the champions of colonialism that other people’s cultures appear to be in just as good a ...”

“... prices, clouds, coastlines, word frequency and clusters of galaxies. In a touching afterword, Michael Frame, a Yale professor who collaborated with him, mourns the hole left by his absence; he ends with an aperçu from Mandelbrot’s last major talk, just before his death: ‘Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules … repeated without end.’ A ...”

“... women in the family. The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine drew attention to this silent levy on the energies of ‘dependent’ female relatives. To the extent that their contribution was supervisory and clerical, the magazine claimed, they could be found doing chores in some of the country’s wealthiest families. Even in households cushioned by ...”

“... same side as their leader. Rather than acting as a vehicle for Bevan’s views, Tribune, edited by Michael Foot, described itself as leading the campaign against the H-bomb. Lee believed that the Bevanites’ desertion was responsible for the cancer that killed Bevan in 1960: ‘until their attacks began, he never had so much as a stomach ache,’ she wrote ...”

“... the outside – as it were by that tribunal of the distant gods whom Nietzsche praises. Deborah Levy describes a scene very similar to Cusk’s in her acute essay, Things I Don’t Want to Know, but her sense of belonging is different: I found myself thinking about some of the women, the mothers who had waited with me in the school playground while we ...”