“... that is the best he can do. Seven years after his father’s death, the poet and novelist John Burnside stumbled almost incidentally on the facts of his early life. Talking to his mother’s sister, he learned that the elder Burnside – ‘Tommy Dick, or George McGhee, or whatever his name was’ – had been an abandoned child, found, by whom is not ...”

“... and town. Millions of pots and pans were hurled into primitive furnaces to make ‘backyard steel’. But by mid-1959 it was clear to many of Mao’s colleagues that the Leap had stumbled badly: a combination of waste, incompetence and attempts by local officials to enforce wildly unrealistic targets. Mao had already sent members of his entourage to ...”

“... Valley, or the backward provinces of Mexico, or the banana plantations of the Caribbean, or the steel plants of Ukraine, or the coffee plantations of Kenya, by the fact that the visiting reporter cannot be a man or woman with a pencil or a camera, but is always a representative of the West. The West is now seen as an imperialist force by most people in the ...”

“... hell fire. Even descriptions of nature in America are macabre. What he remembers of a trip with John Dos Passos are the corpses of tortoises squashed on the road, and ‘the asparagus-like stench’ of a run-over skunk. On a holiday at Garnet Lake near New York the food goes mysteriously bad, bloated horseflies and red ants share the bedroom, and the ...”

“... phenomenon. He longed to introduce into the teeming variety of Empire a structural core of steel and concrete. It was no accident that he was an early associate of the Fabians, nor that his career ran foul of Winston Churchill. When Amery first met Churchill at Harrow he pushed him into the school swimming-pool. Later on it was usually Churchill who ...”

“... moment of ration books and travel restrictions, of the lust for food, and hymnings of garlic, and John Minton’s seductive, and faintly Post-Impressionist, illustrations to Elizabeth David. Brooke, after the war, heads for the Mediterranean as fast as he possibly can, but, being Brooke, he is already deeply nostalgic for his Army days there and strives to ...”

“... all talking about the same house in a backstreet in Chania. Each of them had given the painter John Craxton a lump sum to repair it, in exchange for a half share in the ownership. None of them minded the imposture, which had been going on for about twenty years, and they all remained friends with Craxton, which says something about his character. His ...”

“... disease has been one of the central realities of human life. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) is overly deterministic, but the basic point it makes about the importance of contagious illness to human history remains valid. The map of our planet was shaped by infectious disease: Cortés gets most of the blame/credit, but it was the viruses he ...”

“... John Keegan’s book is about the principles, strategy and tactics of warfare at sea and their evolution as it is exemplified in four great battles, Trafalgar, Jutland, Midway, and a critical period in that long struggle the Battle of the Atlantic. It is a strangely mixed book, some parts being quite remarkably good and quite unhackneyed, others dealing with matters that have been handled again and again, and doing so with no great originality ...”

“... with ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ (Phillips Brooks) and ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’ (John Greenleaf Whittier) as runners-up. Among the works of the canonical English poets, the lines known to most people are probably those beginning Blake’s Milton, ‘And did those feet in ancient time ...’, which Parry set to music and turned into the hymn ...”

“... When he was 23, A.S.J. Tessimond (Arthur Seymour John, Jack to his family, but known as John in later life) wrote to Ezra Pound, who had recently settled in Rapallo, enclosing some poems and an article on George Bernard Shaw. Tessimond’s letter does not survive, but Pound’s reply does ...”

“... in Plymouth and travelled to London. With her came her husband, the English tobacco planter John Rolfe, and several members of her Native American family. Done up in embroidered silks and Flemish lace, she enjoyed – if that’s the right word – the adulation of the crowds and an audience with James I. She was not, in fact, a princess, however much ...”

“... put behind the governor’s party – 2016 should have been a shoo-in for a Mitt Romney or a John McCain, especially against such an unpopular candidate as Hillary Clinton. A second point: when Lyndon Johnson passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 he said with regret that the Democrats would lose the South for a ...”

“... best we have’. He has called Emma Donoghue ‘one of the great literary ventriloquists’ and John Boyne ‘one of the great craftsmen in contemporary literature’. Gerard Donovan reminds him of ‘other great writers, not least Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka and … Bernhard Schlink’. McCann is the high priest of high praise, always handy with a ...”

“... piece called Appalachian Spring in collaboration with Aaron Copland and Isamu Noguchi. In 1945, John Cage and Merce Cunningham would marry their exploratory sensibilities. All these artists were struggling, in the words of Lincoln Kirstein, who co-founded the New York City Ballet, ‘to impose a native meaning on a recalcitrant alien dance ...”