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“... Lawyers these days doubtless read John Mortimer, and dons read the new university wits like David Lodge and Tom Sharpe. But in any wider competition for the post of English humorist-in-residence, Michael Frayn would surely be a prime contender. Now verging on sixty, his collected plays and translations fill three thick volumes, his early newspaper ...”

“... the violence, or starved back (miners got little strike pay and no state help, since it wasn’t held by the courts to be an ‘official’ strike). Both books agree that Margaret Thatcher’s eventual victory enabled her to consolidate a free-market programme of deregulation that would soon merge with the wider international movement of neoliberalism. The ...”

“... and its eclectic membership included the philosopher Bernard Williams, the sports commentator David Coleman and the agony aunt Marje Proops. The report they produced two years later was measured, intelligent, elegantly written, slightly agonised and almost wholly ineffectual. The Rothschild Commission accepted that the law on gambling in Britain remained ...”

“... to photograph Emma Hamilton’s ‘attitudes’, curiosity about those poses and why they were held to be so affecting would be satisfied. He found, I guess, the business of making the ‘surrealised portraits’ and others with backgrounds of blown up scripts and press cuttings, or the double exposures, or the photographic collages, or the pictures of ...”

“... If they’re good enough for Harold Koh, they’re good enough for me.’ Koh recently held a visiting professorship at NYU Law School, where this spring a handful of students wrote an open letter questioning his fitness to teach human rights. Koh’s defenders immediately responded with a letter of their own signed by dozens of legal ...”

“... there was an achievement in his resistance. ‘Is this man simply not cut out for the job?’ David Cameron asked at Prime Minister’s Question Time. Unlike the subject of his biography, Brown has held high office, but he’s a less successful public speaker, he doesn’t have Maxton’s enormous smile and he doesn’t ...”

“... located at the ‘addresses’ we type into our browsers. All .uk domain names, for example, are held on a database run by a not-for-profit private company called Nominet, which is based in Oxford. When you type https://www.lrb.co.uk into your browser, a few packets of data are sent via your internet service provider to Nominet’s database, which sends them ...”

“... Still, for all the pathos, Callaghan was 68 when he resigned in 1980, the only man to have held all four of the great offices of state, and had been in Parliament since 1945. It wasn’t a bad effort. Longevity is increasingly rare in British politics. We have got used to political careers coming abruptly to a halt, defeated prime ministers leaving ...”

“... harsh and inviolable. Even Wilson’s feisty subject timed her pleasures to its unalterable rhythm.David Henkin sets out to discover how Americans became such creatures of the seven-day week. By the time the United States was founded as an independent republic, he writes, North Americans were already ‘by the contemporary standards of Europe … particularly ...”

“... or immerse himself in it for too long, setting out on long walks and trips alone, as his alter ego David Copperfield does in moments of depression when society seems to offer only disappointment. A year after his admission to the Garrick, Dickens resigned from it. In each of the following three decades he would rejoin the Garrick and resign again in protest ...”

“... when it came to Gillray’s turn he made them all kneel reverentially and drink to Jacques-Louis David, a notorious republican, as the “first painter and patriot in Europe”.’ The anecdote is second-hand but entirely credible, and the question only occurs later: could he have meant it? No one was sure at the time. Draper Hill surmised that the meeting ...”

“... is not always so. It does apply if the information you want to know is information about yourself held by some public body. It also applies to a lot of information relevant to public decisions. The book that Des Wilson has edited, on behalf of the Campaign for Freedom of Information in Britain, brings out, in a section on international comparisons, how ...”

“... of life for the Palestinians of Gaza (and for those in the area of Jenin, whose lives were held hostage to the whims of four tiny Jewish settlements in the West Bank that have also been dismantled). For the first time in years, they will be free from constant Israeli supervision and harassment: they will be able to go for an evening stroll; to swim in ...”

“... as an experimental novelist, but the narrative slackness of these books isn’t like that of David Markson’s novels, for instance, which have the minimalist, unnerving rhythm of a needle trapped in the final groove of a record. Their dark outlook isn’t like that of Thomas Bernhard, whose cynicism is driven by a kind of grim joy, nor do they have the ...”

“... Gaza. The remaining hostages would be released in stages, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Over the first six weeks, the Israeli army would withdraw from major population centres and humanitarian aid would be allowed in. Air operations over the strip would be suspended for ten hours a day. During two subsequent phases the remaining ...”