“... paying the highest price in the loss of the lives of our young soldiers – almost alone. I’m John Kerry and I approved this message. In a world of instant projections and medium-is-the-message contemplations, commentary on the presidential race of 2004 might finish right there: Kerry’s style is downbeat, America-blaming, slightly depressing, while the ...”

“... is within me. So Bidart wrote in a long poem that retold Ovid’s myth of Cinyras and Myrrha, the king who lusts only for his only daughter and the daughter who reciprocates, and eventually consummates, that lust. Exiled, enraged at herself, and unable to revive the stillborn child of her incestuous union, Myrrha says a prayer, ‘Make me nothing ...”

“... whale is a ‘tyrant’ who falls victim to the plots of little fishes, and finally a ‘slain king’ whose death goes unrevenged. In these respects he could be a precursor of Hobbes’s Leviathan – that other ‘confusion of a man and a whale’, as John Bramhall (one of Hobbes’s early critics) described it – and ...”

“... Then all around from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat so he gave up being king of where the wild things are. But the wild things cried: ‘Oh please don’t go. We’ll eat you up – we love you so!’ And Max said: ‘No!’ The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes ...”

“... back for a good long while. I don’t know that he’s still not over it. Fifty Septembers ago, John Steinbeck set out across America with his old standard poodle Charley as company. It was election season, as it was this September: Nixon-Kennedy. Steinbeck was 58, younger than the Maestro and myself, and near the end of his life. One can feel it in his ...”

“... John Singer Sargent has often been accused of lacking a soul. Even Henry James, who helped introduce him to the London scene in the 1880s and continued to promote his work, worried that he suffered from a ‘sort of excess of cleverness’. The fact that Sargent catered to a transatlantic clientele of celebrities and nouveaux riches at the height of the Gilded Age only encouraged the imputations of superficiality ...”

“... Dante, Michelangelo and Shakespeare did, as well as more recent experimenters such as Hopkins, John Berryman or the sub-Prynnean Tony Lopez. Donne and Hopkins used sonnets as vehicles for religious anguish because it’s so easy to suggest that they’re buckling under pressure, that the spirit will not run true to the form, or to God. The sonnet has a ...”

“... protests in the streets: the demonstrators condemned the killings and chanted slogans in favour of King Abdullah. Zawahiri drew the obvious conclusion, but other jihadis failed to understand the value of restraint. Every time a jihadi movement has won power it has lost popularity by failing to give the people what they want: peace, security and jobs. In ...”

“... with China’s long struggle against Japan than by any Malayan patriotism, let alone by loyalty to King George VI, young Chinese militants went into the jungle to fight the Japanese. The core of this resistance was the Malayan Communist Party, overwhelmingly Chinese in membership. Before the war, the MCP had been the main target of Special Branch ...”

“... two-volume Life and the biographies by Wendy Moffat, Nicola Beauman and Francis King.) As such, it joins distinguished portraits of Novalis (Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower), Dostoevsky (Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg) and Henry James (Colm Tóibín, The Master), plus recentish likenesses of ...”

“... Browne and Congreve as well as such less remembered figures as the sea captain Robert Knox, and John Chilton, who, Macdonald speculates, was ‘probably’ the author of Voyage to the West Indies … in the year 1560. The penalty for wearing so much learning lightly was, at this midpoint in her career, to be patronised by the more severe and humourless ...”

“... could do all these things, with operations stretching around the globe.In the late 19th century John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil had a monopoly on oil refineries, pipelines, rail transport and storage facilities in the US, but it didn’t control US oilfields, and – to start with – depended on British oil traders to ship its products to Europe. In ...”

“... more concerned about keeping its plans secret from Washington. Some Americans, including Senator John F. Kennedy, already supported Algerian independence. Oil and gas had been found in Algeria, and French intelligence had discovered that American oil companies were in correspondence with an FLN leader, Ahmed Ben Bella, about possible oil leases. This was ...”

“... the director Alan Clarke in which a repressed Midlands schoolboy’s visions of Edward Elgar and King Penda threaten to unlock the secrets of his own sexuality. All of these productions are considered at length in The Magic Box, Rob Young’s hefty survey of occult British film and television. Young, who wrote the excellent Electric Eden (2010), a history of ...”

“... he disliked anti-slavery far more. In 1859 he led the detachment of US Marines that captured John Brown, following the failed raid on Harpers Ferry. But Lee considered Brown marginal, even ridiculous; as Guelzo shows, it was the emergence of the anti-slavery Republican Party that politicised him. On Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, seven Southern ...”