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“... has some things in common with right-wing demagogues of the past, but Snyder neglects the next, more difficult step: explaining how Trump, and the context in which he arose, is different. The new president did not come to power thanks to the collapse of a liberal Weimar-like regime, but rather after a quarter of a century of domestic liberal triumph and ...”

“... of the church clerks whom they seemed to disdain. Professor Barlow’s sterling new biography of Thomas Becket shows us a man whose origins, like William’s, were not of the highest: his father ‘may have been in textiles’. Like William, Thomas owed his rise, not to inheritance, but to his being sent to the household ...”

“... then the last time I went to the Villa Farnese at Caprarola, seven miles away, there were more people working in the ticket office than there were tourists, even though it’s one of the most magnificent secular buildings in Italy).Much the most interesting thing about Santa Maria di Falleri, however, is what lies beneath. The track leading to the ...”

“... Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring himself to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking relish. Gossip has its charms, but not when it’s dragged out over three ...”

“... in terms of material substrates, it’s been asked ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ – though Thomas Nagel’s famous essay of 1974 wasn’t really about the consciousness or sensory world of bats but about the consciousness and sensibilities of reductionist philosophers. (Nagel’s answer: we don’t know, and we certainly aren’t on the way to knowing ...”

“... as a sign of the philosopher’s madness. Erasmus offers two suggestions, less eschatological, more psychologically and indeed physiologically informed than that of Socrates. ‘Is death as horrible a thing as it’s commonly asserted to be?’ asks Marcolphus the naive character, in one of the Colloquies. No, says Phaedrus, the voice of wisdom: ‘If a ...”

“... and nourished with intellectual fodder. ‘Those who wish to revive the West,’ concludes Mr Thomas, ‘should recognise that one of the benefits of a study of history is that it is always possible to reverse, as Plato put it, an apparently fatal tendency towards decay, however late the hour …’ The weight of our planet’s unfinished history ...”

“... Once more upon the waters! yet once more! And the waves bound beneath me as a steed That knows his rider.On 25 April 1816, Byron set out from Dover for the Continent, never to return to England. Four days earlier, he had signed the separation papers that put an end to what Benita Eisler calls ‘one of the most infamously wretched marriages in history ...”

“... to make their own lives easier, at the cost, no doubt, of making the lives of certain authors more exasperating. They are dangerous terms because they tempt us to lump writers like Muriel Spark and Alice Thomas Ellis together, especially when there are other alluring points of comparison, such as a characteristic tone ...”

“... was increasingly recognised as a challenging alternative to the traditions of the West. An even more sensitive frontier is explored in Reich-Ranicki’s study of the role of Jews in German literature, Uber Ruhestörer (1973). In this short collection of lectures and reviews, Jewish writers from Heine to Jurek Becker are assigned the function of ...”

“... expedition in 1578: if the ore wasn’t as rich as they’d hoped, then they’d simply need more of it. The plan was to establish a mining colony, never mind that the chosen site was ‘one of the most desolate and inaccessible parts of the North Atlantic basin’. A permanent settlement proved impossible, however, and within a couple of months ...”

“... an ambiguous relationship with the law. He’s just one among the hundreds of functionaries – more famous than the others, admittedly, though his clerk may exaggerate his fame – who work at and for the Agency, the only force of law and order in the city. What’s more, as often as not he solves his cases ...”

“... 1990s, liberalism was still a dynamic force on the court. But the last liberal justices retired more than a decade ago. Nobody on the bench is interested in reviving the strong egalitarianism of the 1960s, when the Warren Court was in its heyday. The present judicial spectrum ranges from moderate liberals to radical rightists, and Bush will be aiming to ...”

“... break with Rome, complete by 1534, England stood alone. Henry VIII’s imperial claims, couched in Thomas Cromwell’s majestic legalese, were introspective, asserting the power of the monarch freed from the constraints of papal rule. The economy was beset by inflation, there were land shortages and there was growing poverty, along with anxiety about the ...”

“... public attention with pastiche and forgery. Chatterton not only invented the character and work of Thomas Rowley, supposedly a Bristol monk, but also carefully presented it in faded ink on artificially aged parchment, strangely intent on fooling connoisseurs of medieval literature such as Horace Walpole, author of the earliest Gothic novel, The Castle of ...”