“... the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, made the ecoterrorist a pop cultural staple. The nadir was Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear (2004), in which a group of eco-extremists fake climate disasters for political ends. Crichton appended various denialist tracts to the text, though its paranoid reading of climate politics was a few years ahead of the ...”

“... and emphasis. The delivery was crafted to move like natural speech, with a leavening of slow-burn humour. This was a country-smart poetry, beautifully balanced between frontier transcendentalism and the long gaze of Asia. A week on the road is enough to confirm my instinct that this western strip, all the way down from Canada to Mexico, with its climatic ...”

“... explosive payloads – at home. ‘Do you want to build an FPV drone with your own hands that will burn a Russian tank?’ the project website asks. ‘Then this opportunity is for you!’Government enthusiasm for a cottage kamikaze drone industry (the foundation, it should be noted, doesn’t ask amateur constructors to add the explosives themselves in their ...”

“... it theirs. ‘The first time I met Rosemary she was with the Shankhill Help,’ said Wilson Free-burn, with a mug of tea in front of him. ‘It was 12 years ago and we had no money and I was involved in community relations and she was trying to give Citizens Advice.’ He stared into the Formica. ‘She had sparkle you know – and she never charged those ...”

“... his head – ‘La, Sir! You’re always fancying things.’ One of the book’s recent champions, Michael Neve, finds it a ‘subtle meditation on the philosophical ludicrousness of love’, a ‘picture of driven desire that, with Freudian exactness, ends up without even an obscure object’. All the while Hazlitt continued his punishing schedule of literary ...”

“... and sometimes by strenuous physical effects on Kelley: ‘he thought verily that his bowels did burn.’ ‘His body had a fiery heat, even from his breast down unto all his parts, his privities and thighs.’ ‘He started, and said he felt a thing creeping within his head, and in that pang became all in a sweat; and he remained much misliking the moving ...”

“... started a new album, ‘EGYPT’. On the first page, a collage of stamps of King Farouk, who, like Michael of Romania, was a boy at his accession. The stamps are the first issue of his reign, designed in 1937. Later in the album we find the revised design of 1944, by which time Farouk was 24 and wearing a manly moustache on his rather pudgy face. The Farouk ...”

“... the Dome is showbiz. Old showbiz, resting showbiz, between projects showbiz: David Puttnam, Michael Grade and sparky Floella Benjamin. Disney World on message. The critics have been taken care of with nicely weighted sweetheart deals. The Mail, along with the London Evening Standard, which had combined its anti-Jeffrey Archer campaign with a series of ...”

“... Auden went to Portugal to work on a play, The Ascent of F-6, with Isherwood. The protagonist, Michael Ransom, sets out to conquer a faraway mountain in a place called Sudoland. If he succeeds, it will add to the honour and glory of England. When he finally reaches the summit, he meets his mother, who is a sort of Britannia. He is eulogised as one of ...”

“... meet their deadlines in the phased demilitarisation set out in Thaci’s undertaking. General Sir Michael Jackson, the KFOR commander, to whom the undertaking was given, has said in effect that full disarmament is a pipe-dream, but he’s confident that some sort of demilitarisation schedule will be completed and he’s prepared to stretch a date or two on ...”

“... Perhaps for that reason their stories about time spent with Tom and Viv – the title of Michael Hastings’s uninspired play, first performed in 1984 and then made into a movie – have proved in some instances to be irresistibly quotable. In the end, however, very little of consequence is in fact disclosed about the Eliots or the marriage, only ...”

“... to signal future claims. Twenty years later, John Quincy Adams did not hesitate to send troops to burn down squatters’ homes and crops in Alabama. But these legal enforcements would be swept away in the coming demographic storm. The settler-sceptical northeastern Federalists had many political victories, and the state later used much of its ‘land ...”

“... of what the EU had become. Once the campaign began, two of his leading cabinet ministers – Michael Gove the slyest and Boris Johnson the most popular of his colleagues, neither of them close to the ERG, both actuated by career rather than conviction – declared themselves for Leave.In parliamentary terms, Remain still had a winning hand, since ...”

“... of the employees: There was so much wastage during the CEGB days. It was like they had money to burn. The stores were always full and we had spares for everything. Bureaucracy was part of the problem. If you signed stuff out of the stores, even if you found you’d got the wrong bits, you couldn’t sign them back in. The system didn’t allow that. There ...”