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“... a job and who is not. Those who make fortunes, men whose profits the state depends on, will have more than one vote: tycoons will have as many as nine. ‘Hello, I am H.L. Hunt,’ he would introduce himself. ‘I’m the richest man in the world.’ In the 1950s that wasn’t far from the truth, but because Hunt flew economy, parked his car five hundred ...”

“... and failed to form a government with Beppe Grillo’s Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S), which had won more votes than the PD alone but fewer than the centre-left coalition as a whole. He then tried and failed – not least because of manoeuvring by Renzi, who had lost heavily to Bersani in a primary to determine the leader of the coalition – to persuade ...”

“... or even Vermeer-forging, sense. Some gentlemanly code of ethics enfolds the activities of Thomas Wise and his fellows. As for purely literary, as opposed to bibliographical forgery, it receives no censure at all. Indeed, it receives rather high esteem. James Crossley, the distinguished 19th-century antiquarian and bibliographer, plumed himself on ...”

“... Thomas Mann’s​ most noteworthy appearance in Irish letters until now came in one of the last poems of W.B. Yeats. In the spring of 1938 the poet read a piece in the Yale Review by Archibald MacLeish, the only article on his work ‘which has not bored me for years’ – a disarming piece of Yeatsian egotism since most of the article was not about him ...”

“... A news​ broadcast from 17 November 1986 shows François Mitterrand and Thomas Sankara at an official dinner in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. Sankara had taken power in a military coup three years before. In the clip he is on his feet delivering a speech and Mitterrand is seated. Sankara has established a radical social programme that aims to modernise his country and lead it out of the feudalism and neo-colonialism which, he believes, has beleaguered it since independence in 1960 ...”

“... us his story as a disembodied narrative voice, but is actually committing words to paper. The more strenuously the novel tries to establish its documentary status, haphazardly arranged, spontaneously written as fast as Matt can type, the more contrived it seems. A story as neatly structured and carefully told as The ...”

“... was rather ‘another possible and perfectly valid way of continuing the series, only with a much more complicated justification’. As Seldom observes, ‘Frank had rediscovered in practice, in a real experiment, what Wittgenstein had already proved theoretically decades earlier: the impossibility of establishing an unambiguous rule . . . You can always ...”

“... too much of an optimist, too little of a polemicist to supply the Rousseauian rejoinder: ‘An art more pernicious to men than all the ills it pretends to cure’. But no one who follows Simon Schama’s advice helpfully prescribed in the blurb – ‘take a dose of the book at least once a day and retire early to bed’ – will sleep easy. In fact, two ...”

“... The fourth volume of the Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy opens with a recommendation for Mr Harry Pouncy, ‘Lecturer and Entertainer’, of Dorchester, apparently with a view to his extending his fascinations to a wider public. There follows a note to Desmond MacCarthy suggesting – surely with the firm touch of a provincial or a Victorian survivor – that it would be better if the New Quarterly were called instead the Quarterly Herald or Quarterly Clarion, ‘or some such ...”

“... Here are the nominees for the greatest bad argument in political theory. They are: Thomas Hobbes, for Leviathan; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, for The Communist Manifesto; and Plato, for the Republic. Why them? Each of the candidates is hallowed as a Penguin Classic. Each has been foisted on freshman generations in Pol Phil 101 ...”

“... of Marlowe’s life, particularly of his childhood. Christopher Marlowe – or Marley, in the more common contemporary spelling, the one he used in his only extant signature – was born in the parish of St George, Canterbury, in February 1564. He was the son of John Marlowe, shoemaker, and Katherine née Arthur, a Dover woman. They had nine ...”

“... not her name, which Jem refuses to tell another friend when asked. Then it transpires that she is more likely a therapist than a lover: ‘Do you think it’s cruel that in the hour you have for me there are only fifty minutes? . . . One day I think you should take me home and let me sit at your table, a stranger there, to watch you with your family.’ So ...”

“... The novel perhaps owes to Greek tragedy the notion that the only sure consequence of murder is yet more murder, but the role of the classics is otherwise more decorative than structural, providing a badge of difference for the principal characters, a classy veneer of erudition (a little chipped in places) and some handy plot ...”

“... grow one. I can wait.’ Metcalf’s banter may be nearly as sharp as Marlowe’s, but he’s more self-conscious about his use of imagery. In the course of his inquisition he goes to see Stanhunt’s fellow urologist, Grover Testafer. At the house he meets the doctor’s lover, an evolved sheep called Dulcie. ‘“Okay,” I said. “You’re afraid of ...”

“... stained glass, though churches are always proud when they have a Piper window, the latest (and no more pleasing than the rest) glimpsed at Paul Scofield’s memorial service in St Margaret’s, Westminster. For all that, though, the book is immensely readable, drawing together so many strands of the artistic life in the 1930s and 1940s – K. Clark, Ben ...”