“... powers of Ernest Bevin (‘his crowning achievement’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, David Lammy). Apps describes Bevin as ‘the man who would strike the initial spark that started Nato’ and who took the ‘first faltering steps’ towards its creation. But however long you pick over Bevin’s correspondence with George Marshall and Arthur ...”

“... of point of view, McGurl is following the lead of such figures as Ken Kesey and his teacher Wallace Stegner, who founded the Stanford creative writing programme in 1946. It was in Stegner’s class, McGurl relates, that Kesey learned that point of view ‘truly is the most important problem in writing’:The book I have been doing [One Flew over the ...”

“... the repressiveness of the two Red Scares; the glowering populism of Father Coughlin and George Wallace; the savagery and corruption of slumlord capitalism. It seeks to dismantle what remains of the country’s already diminished democracy, and to establish in its place a predatory regime answerable to a single leader and his entourage. Whether the regime ...”

“... from his friends what he later felt had been severe mental suffering, not least when his brother David fell to his death from a hotel window at the age of 19; most of all, he concealed the Game, and had a lifelong terror of people finding out about it. He admired Rimbaud and drank heavily; Barbara tried to coax him away from the bottle. He went off to Spain ...”

“... sleepy under heavy lids, but they were eyes which missed little and gave nothing away.’) Edgar Wallace, dictating to a harem of secretaries, didn’t feel the need to blather on about how ‘the criminal justice system has favoured criminals for the last forty years.’ Neither was he stuck with a hero who is increasingly embarrassed at being spotted in a ...”

“... Salam on electroweak gauge theory; and, of course, Darwin and the undercelebrated Alfred Russel Wallace on evolution by natural selection. Every instance of what has been called ‘simultaneous discovery’ lends credence to the notion that the individual does not matter in the course of science, or matters in a very different sort of way from authorial ...”

“... end of the decade rare ‘class’ was being shown by such public-school amateurs as Peter May and David Sheppard. In 1949, such was the craze for sport, 90,000 people turned up to watch the FA Amateur Cup Final. As Anthony Bailey, who watched Portsmouth when they won the League Championship two years running, fondly remembers, ‘football shorts were long and ...”

“... politician. ‘In some respects,’ Woodward writes, he ‘was a walking example of what novelist Wallace Stegner calls “resilience under disappointment”, the persistence of drive, hard work and even stubbornness when ambition has not been fully realised’. In State of Denial, he’s a monster.When Jay Garner returned to Washington in the summer of 2003 ...”

“... more agricultural) and you are somewhat executive, so much the better,’ he wrote to Wallace Stevens teasingly in 1935. ‘It is so we are saved from being literary … Our poetry comes choppy, in well-separated poems, well interrupted by time, sleep and events.’ As a boy, he told his friend Bernard De Voto, he had been entirely normal: ‘I ...”

“... the Pinochet coup. Was there any contact between the Thatcher entourage and such groups as Colonel David Stirling’s GB 75? Did Mrs Thatcher know that Airey Neave had been involved in discussions about raising a ‘resistance army’ if Labour were returned in 1979? 3. Airey Neave was later killed by a car bomb outside the House of Commons. It has always been ...”

“... who opposes a net zero emissions goal has in becoming a university vice chancellor. As Lord Wallace of Saltaire remarked in the Lords debate on the higher education legislation last year, ‘If challenging the allegedly oppressive liberal cultural elite means insisting on climate change sceptics being appointed to senior academic positions regardless of ...”

“... was still an individual, not a corporate activity; not the rebel as Mel-Gibson-as-William-Wallace plus army, but the rebel as Sid Vicious or David Bowie. For many Scots, self-determination, rather than nationalism, remains the cause. Now, 35 years later, were I living in Scotland, I’d vote yes to ...”

“... rise of black feminism in the 1970s. In Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1978), Michele Wallace traced the movement’s ‘love affair with Black Macho’ back to Native Son. Black women writers never forgave Wright for having once accused Zora Neale Hurston of writing ‘in the safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro ...”

“... On​ 18 June, the sixth day of Israel’s attack on Iran, David Petraeus gave some unsolicited advice to Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him to dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment programme or face ‘the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people ...”

“... nationalism, as well as his middle-finger politics and his ‘America First’ ranting, comes from David Duke, the former grand wizard of the KKK; from George Wallace, the segregationist governor and former presidential nominee; from Joe McCarthy, who thought America was being overrun by aliens; and from lynch-happy Pat ...”