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“... Nixon, Carter, Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Losing 35 seats (that’s the number as I write; it may go one or two higher) puts him right in the middle of the range. He did much better than most of his predecessors in the Senate, but that was in large part because the electoral map favoured him, as it did in 2016. Many things about the campaign were ...”

“... the day should not prevent him from dancing at Annabel’s during the night. As an attitude it may be defensible, but it led to a certain amount of mistrust and it contributed to some unreliable journalism. Hitchens in America is recognisably the same creature as he was in Britain, but his range is wider, his writing is more sensitive and his judgments are ...”

“... at their ease; it’s argumentative. Here and there the argument is illuminating, as when David Bomberg’s In the Hold (c.1913-14) is hung next to Leon Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon (1971). Both are busy compositions, with a mass of vigorous figures squeezed closely into a space. But the Bomberg is pretty abstract and is ...”

“... is the story, told in Philip Hoare’s 1995 biography, of Coward’s visit to the Court to see David Storey’s grittily realistic Rugby League play The Changing Room. His attention having been drawn to the male genitalia on display in the bath scene, Coward remarked: ‘13 acorns are not worth the price of admission.’ ‘Not worth the price of ...”

“... so he could talk to the president alone. He told them he had a personal message to convey from David Cameron. In fact, he used the time to pursue some business on behalf of Tony Blair Associates, his commercial calling card. He wanted to sell the Nigerians Israeli drones and other military equipment for use in their fight against Islamic rebels. If true ...”

“... Other Island), the playwrights listed above wrote about England as if they were English. There may be Irish resonances in Waiting for Godot, but Beckett set it in no man’s land and wrote it in France (and when required to make short trips home to Ireland was subject to depression and illness). Until recently, most great playwrights of Irish origin have ...”

“... leveraging their paranoia into real power. Conspiracy theorists are often simply nuts. Ferguson may be a conspiracy theorist as well, but if so he isn’t letting on. In this, his fourth autobiography, he has a chapter about his interests outside football. One of his passions is the Kennedy assassination, to which he has devoted a lot of time and a fair bit ...”

“... the panorama of picture-making is not always alight with understanding or information. The author may have been born on the night in 1933 when his uncle Alexander Korda’s first great success, The Private Life of Henry VIII, opened, and that could have made Michael a good-luck charm in Alex’s eyes. But Michael is neither a film buff nor a historian of the ...”

“... Equality can be seen as an indirect attempt to reaffirm its relevance. On the surface its concerns may seem to be different: to establish which parts of Marxism are still defensible and which are not, and to scrutinise the idea of self-ownership that has played a central role in recent libertarian thought, especially in North America. To these tasks Cohen ...”

“... Guiana, and dominates operations like the attempted ‘destabilisation’ of Manley in Jamaica. It may be an MI6 man who is ambassador to Mauritius, close to the Indian Ocean base at Diego Garcia. But the US calls the shots. The British have tried to plug the dyke of disclosures. They exerted heavy pressure on the United States not to let British material ...”

“... identified, identity and the ability to distinguish between different identities is nothing. This may represent an ideal of Shakespeare’s, who was the father of twins, though of different sex. There is nothing more frustrating for parents than mistaking their own twins. They feel guilty and at the same time awed that they cannot distinguish between two ...”

“... on an island off the Welsh coast. Here writers live in a community paid for by a trust. They may write, they may not. They may find, or they may destroy, themselves. Each is obliged to undertake seven Main Events, a kind of DIY ordeal, under the ...”

“... leaders has come out of it well (the less said about Clegg the better). Yet the inadvertent result may be as good as could be hoped for in a miserable situation. Putin has shown his ruthless adeptness. The democracies have shown their inconsistency, which is nonetheless a form of flexibility. It is not edifying, but it can be ...”

“... There is an odd experience that Plato may have had. If light filters into a room through a small enough aperture, anything moving on the street outside will cast its shadow on the ceiling and back wall, and the shadow may have only the most abstract resemblance to the original. Perhaps the human predicament is really like that ...”

“... is the real danger for the professional historian that if he writes an outstanding biography, it may, even now, become a best-seller. For biography still flourishes – albeit on a reduced scale and with diminished intellectual self-confidence – both within and without the walls of academe. In one guise, it has been reincarnated as prosopography, which ...”