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“... before the appearance of the first nickelodeons, and pursues it through to the US entry into World War Two. Hollywood and Anti-Semitism is less a study of Jewish influence on American movies than an account of what Carr calls the Hollywood Question – which is to say, the ways that this presumed influence has been represented, and what those representations ...”

“... an unstable concoction. Trump is an enthusiastic trade warrior who occasionally indulges in anti-war rhetoric. His anti-empire talk may be as insincere as the ‘foreign policy for the middle class’ of Biden’s patrician national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. Both nod to sentiments they can’t comprehend. After ...”

“... are now printed for the first time ever. The novel was written in China in the immediately pre-war years; the ballet belongs to 1942, when Empson was working for the BBC and writing propaganda for Chinese consumption. Between Cambridge and the BBC he had published Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Poems and Some Versions of Pastoral (both of 1935), and a ...”

“... restaurants, where buskers play mariachi music or corridos for an audience that’s half middle-class, half drug dealers. It’s only recently that people have started going out at night again, and a number of establishments are still closed because of the cuota, the street ‘tax’ paid to the narcos for protection. Two years ago they asked for too ...”

“... throughout the Arab East’. While the Israeli Communist Party commemorated the 1948 Arab-Israeli War as a struggle for national independence, Matzpen, which broke from the CPI in 1962, viewed it as a campaign of ethnic cleansing (or tihour, the term used by Zionist forces at the time). In fact it was both – but only Matzpen had the courage to speak of ...”

“... As seen​ by the English-speaking world, the Spanish Civil War was a screen on which certain images could be projected, images of harsh sunlight, moral clarity and sacrifice. It was an emblematic, almost allegorical war and a test case for conscience, a political crisis so thoroughly appropriated that the Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse hardly needed to point out that its contributors were overwhelmingly outsiders: it was the war that was Spanish, not the poetic response ...”

“... the mysticism and irrationality, the violence of politics, the idealism and barbarism of the Civil War. ‘Spain is different,’ said the Francoists in justification of their denial of human rights and democratic principles: it was not suited to representative government. Everyone else disagreed, rightly, while at the same time hoping that the country would ...”

“... is our house,’ they would say. They tried enrolling her in school when she was three, in a class with children twice her age, but she cried too much. Her parents ‘thought that I was a genius; they even arranged for me to take an IQ test to prove it’. It didn’t, so ‘they were convinced something was wrong with the test.’ She insisted on ...”

“... Having seen off the Macmillan Government in the 1960s, exposed the squalid underbelly of upper-class public life and fired the starting pistol to begin the sexual revolution by revealing that ‘You’ve never had it so good’ was actually ‘You’ve never had it so often,’ she reckons she knows what’s what about the world of politics and power ...”

“... the Cubans fought alone against the Spanish. Then, in April 1898, the United States entered the war against a now exhausted Spain, waving the flag of Cuba Libre. American journalists and politicians hailed the intervention: it was ‘the most honourable single war in all history’, in the words of George Hoar, Republican ...”

“... the door and looked in apologetically. We must have been conscripted at the same point in the war, but being older he had already been up at Oxford: now he was a graduate, starting a BLitt. Since he was already quite famous in university circles I knew who he was although we had never met. I remember being impressed by his clothes. In those days after the ...”

“... or unclouded, and that Mrs Thatcher was, with one exception, the least well-regarded of all post-war prime ministers escaped him. Most of the book consists of extracts from Urban’s diary, which tell of the help he and other academics gave to the Prime Minister in the writing of her speeches and the formation of her attitudes. Few political speeches merit ...”

“... Imperial point of view. However, the fruits of his political time were mixed: exhilaration at a war won and despair at a peace lost. It is appropriate that the first letter included in this volume should complain about Robert Buchanan, who had found in Kipling’s work ‘all that is most deplorable, all that is most retrograde and savage, in the restless ...”

“... against Isis and officially sanctioned by the state, though they’re widely reported to commit war crimes, mostly against Sunnis. The Imam Ali Brigade, a Shia militia known for posing with severed heads and for its close ties to both the Iranian and Iraqi governments, also maintains a close relationship with the Baghdad Teaching Hospital. ‘I deal with ...”

“... word in the playground was that the thief had been inspired by an essay of mine, read out to the class by the soon-to-be-offended party himself; it was entitled, fairly unambiguously: ‘The Day I Stole the Teacher’s Stick’. Today, however, he was exercised by another sort of crime, a cultural betrayal of which we were all, apparently, guilty. Did we not ...”