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“... generally ascribe national qualities to particular dishes. A cassoulet or a boeuf bourguignon are held to exemplify particular regions, not the country as a whole. Closer to the English in this respect are the Russians, who, as Orlando Figes has observed, collectively have an endless capacity for commenting on how Russian they are. It is easy to imagine a ...”

“... fact that the government found itself reliant on DUP support to remain in office at all. Had May held the parliamentary majority she hoped the 2017 general election was going to deliver – say, fifty or more – she would not be where she now is. Yet that, too, is not a straightforward way of saying that this is some terrible accident. It was the same ...”

“... of a pathological criminal.’ Through all this the ties of personal friendship and collegiality held, as they did in the Weimar Republic that followed German defeat and revolution. But they remained a study in contrasts. Einstein, an international celebrity who brought unwitting prestige to Germany, was attacked at home by the anti-semitic nationalist Right ...”

“... poison oracle, where poison is administered to a chicken and whether the chicken lives or dies is held reliably (even infallibly) to predict the future. Evans-Pritchard believed that the verdict of the poison oracle could not be manipulated or predicted, which was one reason the Azande held it in such esteem. But he also ...”

“... getting out of Germany in 1933, and lucky in heading to Oxford and not Paris. From 1935 to 1941 he held a post in Sweden; then there were four years in America, at Yale and Columbia. He died in New York in 1945. Along the way he wrote a series of widely respected books aimed at both specialist and general readers, and earned the personal esteem and ...”

“... member, I have now read, in addition to the biography, the full-length critical studies by David Mikics and James Naremore, watched Jan Harlan’s excellent documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, and explored every entry in The Stanley Kubrick Archives edited by Alison Castle: a 13-pound art-historical tome containing solid articles on every ...”

“... disgrace and departure, and then to a bitter contest for the succession with John Pardoe, gave David Steel an almost impossible task. He was 39, but looked younger, a slight figure with an easy smile, a son of the Scottish manse, neither obviously at home with scholars, like Grimond, or in London society, like Thorpe. ‘The boy ...”

“... as Bishop Alonso de Cartagena reiterated; and their leaders were reputedly of the stock of King David. To understand the fate of Jews and Muslims after 1250, in a period when virtually all of Spain except Granada was in Christian hands, it is essential to realise that there were two intellectual traditions at work, one home – grown, which tolerated the ...”

“... destroy them as a political force in the process. Up went tuition fees, and out went Nick Clegg. David Cameron was the salesman, Clegg was the punch-bag, but Osborne was the one pulling the strings. Whenever he became the focus of attention, as he did after his ‘omnishambles’ budget in 2012, his lack of presentational skills came close to being his ...”

“... Barnett mounts a vituperative attack on the CBCs, unearthing a priceless memo from David Cameron written in response to accusations that he lacked the common touch: ‘Please, operational grid, give me the right language.’ And he gives an acute analysis of the postwar transition from ‘the government of a whole society by a ...”

“... In the longest-established endurance horse race, the one-hundred-mile Tevis Cup, the record is held by a horse called R.C. Hans, who completed the course in 10 hours and 46 minutes; only nine times since 1961, when records began, has the race been won in under 12 hours. Defoe and Ainsworth were thus describing horses going twice as far (and therefore twice ...”

“... life. None of the judges seems to have been able fully to grasp the force of an argument made by David Harris QC on behalf of Rosie: ‘John Locke’s assertion that "every man has a property in his own person. This no body has any right to but himself” . . . is difficult to apply in the case of conjoined twins.’ I have looked again at the photograph on ...”

“... intervention. ‘The miracle happened in that film emulsion. Who knows why?’ Writing in 1975, David Thomson compared Garbo to Christ – there were times in their lives when all they wanted was to be left alone – before concluding with a reiteration of the same ‘mysterious truth’: ‘She was photographed. She was all in the silver.’ Whether Garbo ...”

“... books complement one another uncannily, as though the authors, like the two campus novelists in David Lodge’s Small World, had agreed to divide up the world between them. By secret treaty, as it were, O’Keeffe got to do facts, and Edwards opinions. The opinions, it should at once be said, are the fruit of immense dedication. Edwards has written widely ...”

“... to convict but who (it had been decided) were too dangerous to set free. These prisoners would be held indefinitely under a new legal dispensation still to be devised. Preventive detention was a step President Nixon had proposed to Congress in 1970, but he never found the support or the temerity to put the programme into effect. Yet here was a Democratic ...”