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“... in the first place.’ No democracy, we are told, has ever reverted to military rule once GDP rose above $8000 per head. The worst that might befall us is something like the experiences of Japan since the freezing of its economic miracle or of Greece in the aftermath of the debt crisis. Japan is elderly – half the population is over the age of 47 ...”

“... the many allegories of the philosophical task, as she saw it, scattered through Gillian Rose’s writings, this one, from Judaism and Modernity (1993), is my favourite. ‘One must be able to give and take from others, to acknowledge difference and identity, togetherness and separation, understanding and misunderstanding’: so think of thinking ...”

“... Now, don’t you feel good? And so, for some fifty years from the 1610s, the burghers of Haarlem rose to the occasion and thrust themselves forwards, as swaggeringly as they could manage. Four centuries on, am I pleased to meet them thus? Not much, in many cases. So often Hals’s portrait subjects seem all too up for this charade, insufferably brash and ...”

“... and the implications of its culture, the complexities of the international situation. Thanks to Steven Gunn, Sean Cunningham, Paul Cavill and one or two others, we are beginning to develop a convincing political narrative that joins the story of the pretenders with the innovations in government, their domestic reception and the larger diplomatic and ...”

“... in which slavery, for both races, seems little more than an occasion for a prolonged party. When Steven Spielberg tried recently to update the celluloid portrayal of slavery, he chose to do so via the Amistad case, which involved not American slaves but Africans who seized control of a Spanish slave ship. The rebels ended up in the United States, but their ...”

“... television cameras for the broadcasting of debates that the cameras were rolling as the Law Lords rose in turn to vote on the outcome of the appeal. I mention this because it has come to be believed that in a sudden rush of PR-consciousness special arrangements were made to televise the delivery of the first Pinochet judgment in the House of Lords. The truth ...”

“... But although Welles believed the stories of death camps circulating by late 1942, he told Rabbi Steven Wise: ‘For obvious reasons you will understand, I cannot give these [facts] to the press.’ Welles may have been silenced on the genocide out of loyalty to FDR’s priorities, Hull out of his own White House ambitions and the desire not to call ...”

“... executive; his counterpart in the latest upswing in the art market is a hedge-fund manager, Steven Cohen, who has used his enormous profits as founder of SAC Capital to build an extensive collection of postwar art in just a few years. (Cohen bought the first Hirst shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, for $8 ...”

“... books put together, even before it was turned into an Oscar-nominated film by Tom Stoppard and Steven Spielberg. His later career was punctuated by international book tours and lavish TV profiles, and towards the end of his life he had the pleasure of turning down a CBE (‘I might have been tempted had I been entitled to call myself Commander Ballard ...”

“... in series or clusters: ‘There were five weekends that August, and for each one of them Steven invited a different woman up – Tracy, India, Yvette, Aster and Bronwyn.’ The impulse seems less to show off a remarkable ability to particularise character than almost to burlesque it, notably when in another story she dips below the surface of ...”

“... responds to caretaking by developing different states of mind, bears a resemblance to his ex-wife Rose: it’s ‘something in the eyes’. He likes chatting with the robot about events of the day. ‘When I wake up in the morning and see her face over there, it makes me feel so nice, like somebody is watching over me.’ In the 1980s, debates in artificial ...”

“... During the​ 1950s and 1960s, a generation of academics rose to prominence in the United States with books and essays that breached the wall separating the university and the broader public. Many of them were historians, including Daniel Boorstin, Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Invocations of history punctuated debates over the Cold War, civil rights and Vietnam ...”

“... by many chess prodigies. His trajectory was extraordinary. In a single year, his Elo rating rose from 904 – only slightly better than moving the pieces at random – to 1907, enough to be among Norway’s top four hundred or so players. When he was 12, his father requested a year’s leave of absence to take him on a chess-playing tour of ...”

“... Islamism of today is very different from the Islamism of the 1980s and 1990s, when radical jihadis rose up against secular-nationalist regimes in Syria, Algeria and Egypt, turning Hama, Algiers and Cairo into war zones. Their interpretation of majority rule doesn’t always make room for minority rights, but aside from al-Qaida and a fringe of ...”

“... the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and Dorothy, soon to be supplemented by endless Geoffreys. This remarkable efflorescence has been described as a ‘personalisation’ of ...”