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“... forward. The willingness of the Lib Dems to accept an apparent fait accompli, like the NHS Bill or Michael Gove’s education ‘revolution’ or even the extent of the spending cuts, was the result not simply of parliamentary weakness or feeble leadership, but of the ambiguities of their own policy and rhetoric. For the last thirty years or so, the Lib Dems ...”

“... too, is used to confront conventional expectations, if not to confound them. Rosalind and Alexander P. Maybrick are as bored of their wealth as they are of each other, and horse-racing offers an attractive escape from both. The novel begins and ends in their bed, and with the tight-fitting irony typical of Smiley, shopping (to stock her burgeoning ...”

“... even when I wish that he had been more selective in writing up the contents of his notebooks. Alexander Frater’s Chasing the Monsoon (1990) is like Fiennes’s book in that it chronicles a journey corresponding to one of the Earth’s great sequential events. Frater never makes me impatient with an overload of quirky detail or a detour from the ...”

“... Unionism. Unsurprisingly, Unionists had few friends in the newspapers. A bizarre exception was Michael Wharton, a satirical and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions ...”

“... she believes, enables her to live life in a ‘higher reality’; and she becomes obsessed with Alexander Herzog, the book’s narrator, when she reads his first novel, ‘avidly, the way you guzzle an elixir’, and assumes he’s someone who could live in that higher reality with her. She cuts his picture out of a publisher’s catalogue and pins it up ...”

“... include any architectural drawings has deprived viewers of a chance to admire even one of Joseph Michael Gandy’s amazing compositions of imaginary buildings, which must rank among the most spectacular exhibition watercolours that have ever been created. More surprising, perhaps, is the fact that Wilton and Lyles cannot bring themselves even to refer to any ...”

“... The first time Alexander Masters met Stuart Shorter, he was crouched in a doorway next to the discount picture-framing shop round the corner from Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge: as it happens, the framing shop I used to work for as a sandwich boarder in my teens. Every Saturday the shop owner would hand me a board and a stack of leaflets and I’d hurry down to Christ’s Pieces, a public green in town which was also, I now know, Stuart’s home ...”

“... Palace, and in 1880 the country was placed under martial law. A month after Dostoevsky’s death Alexander II was assassinated. Dostoevsky believed in the Russian people and in the Tsar as the father of those people – the good father, not the delinquent rogue father represented by the senior Karamazov. He espoused Greater Russian imperial ambitions in the ...”

“... doesn’t play the central role in any of the recent books attached to his name. And who is Alexander Portnoy? Or Mickey Sabbath? At this point we need to remember that Roth’s project is an explanation to himself, not of himself; and an explanation of his world, not his person. What we get in the different sets of novels are not variable confessions ...”

“... woman), Kurt Weill and Max Reinhardt, E.E. Cummings and Janet Flanner, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Alexander Calder’s wire caricature of her (it seems to move on the page of Petrine Archer-Straw’s book) was the prototype for his subsequent mobiles.‘I never saw anybody move the way she did. She was part kangaroo and part prizefighter. A woman made of ...”

“... and galleries; or the Empire gets reimagined as an indulgence merely of the English. Yet, as Michael Fry argues in this vast, contentious volume, alongside the Reformation, the Treaty of Union and the Enlightenment, Empire was ‘one of the great formative experiences’ in Scotland’s past. The Scottish Empire is a remarkable book that could probably ...”

“... decision does no more than affirm that end: it is for Parliament to control things. The judiciary, Alexander Hamilton pointed out, has ‘no influence over either the sword or the purse’. This means, he wrote, that ‘all possible care is requisite to enable it to defend itself against [the executive or the legislature’s] attacks.’ Today the media are as ...”

“... Michi was nobody is certain: a forgotten manager, an outsider, one of the chori or colonos called Michael? The other surviving settlements in the Perené Colony, Pampa Silva and Pampa Whaley, are also named after dead functionaries. In the version we hear from some of those who laboured on the plantation, all three bosses were killed by indigenous people. But ...”

“... that the ‘prophet of this age of transition’ was mourned by men and women of all races. Yet to Michael Coren (who, to do him justice, quotes Priestley in full) Wells’s influence on his age and his legacy to the future were ‘pernicious and destructive’. The mediocre scholarship, factual howlers and slipshod style of this much-publicised biography have ...”

“... the subject possesses the greatest allure for social conservatives. However, as the philosopher Alexander Brown shows in Personal Responsibility, the subject is more slippery than politicians imagine. How should society determine whether someone’s circumstances mean that they are deserving of its support rather than its condemnation? The philosophical ...”