“... January, they have been managed by a new Task Force Europe, led by Johnson’s chief negotiator, David Frost, a burly, acerbic diplomat, one of the few in the Foreign Office who has always loathed the EU. Frost’s conversations with Michel Barnier have become openly bitter and recriminatory, in a way not seen before. Frost is backed up by contemptuous ...”

“... and airstrikes, American military planners felt that its imperial tasks could now be managed by means of an air war and a modest number of specialist shock troops. Throughout 2002, plans for the invasion of Iraq were reformulated to put a greater emphasis on special forces operations. Iraq would require a larger ground force than Afghanistan but would be ...”

“... between drawing and writing that he found the way out of his inability to write a novel and a means of putting his mental bric-à-brac in order. Like Alice, who can only reach the house in Through the Looking-Glass by turning her back to it, Gorey reversed the usual advice to ‘write what you know’ and wrote the apparent opposite of his own ...”

“... the crisis in Ukraine would provide an opportunity ‘to demonstrate exactly what Global Britain means’. At RUSI’s annual land warfare conference in June, the current chief of the general staff, Patrick Sanders, praised the British army’s response to the crisis and said he would now have an answer for his grandchildren if they asked what he did in ...”

“... where he taught for thirty years and lived for the rest of his life. Part of what ‘non-art’ means for Ammons is described in an early poem as ‘the non-song/in my singing’. Singing is usually ghosted by saying (the opening line of his first book – ‘So I said I am Ezra’ – can be heard as either grand or casual). In fact, I can’t think of ...”

“... and circumstances as you might see them if you were writing a novel, then access becomes a daily means of literary supply, and the task is then to make peace, if you can, between the warring truths that come at you from reality. Lillian invented new and bold ways of doing this by dramatising people’s motives, rather than merely describing them, or by ...”

“... in which the imagination is a new saviour at the heart of an aesthetic theology: ‘Poetry is a means of redemption’ or ‘Poetry is a renovation of experience’ or ‘The mind is the most powerful thing in the world.’ The Romantics may have invented this all-powerful sense of the aesthetic, but they invented the distrust of it as well. Keats could ...”

“... middle-aged people, and even some people holding blue and white flags with the star of David on them, representing the Jewish community, or so they said. Here I met my friend Vadim, a former employee of the Black Sea Shipping Company. These days he works for whatever foreign shipping agent needs a chief mate; he’s away at sea for months at a ...”

“... were getting more serious. In 1974 another Clermont habitué and founder of the SAS, Colonel David Stirling, formed GB75, a vigilante group to be mobilised in the event of civil unrest.Veronica Lucan was not only unhappy, she was mentally fragile and her relationship with her sister and brother-in-law volatile. After a spectacularly unhappy Christmas in ...”

“... pursuit, in either case, is hallucinatory and tantalising. Among the characters are two Americans: David Town, who, we hear much later, used to work for the CIA, and was also, once, the secret lover of Qatrina and Marcus’s daughter, the murdered Zameen; and James Palantine, who’s in the US army. Then there’s Dunia, an Afghani schoolteacher harried by the ...”

“... managed to read one of her novels right through. 6 July. But thinking I won’t finish the book means that I can and do and find the novel ends with a flurry of marriages and (if I understand it correctly) the murder of a child being brushed under the carpet, money making all things right. I will try another one – Manservant and Maidservant is said to be ...”

“... officials: a Democrat state assembly member, Alec Brook-Krasny, and a Republican state senator, David Storobin. ‘It took the Greeks two generations to produce one elected politician,’ a local journalist told me proudly. ‘We have two already and they were both born in Russia.’ ‘Russians think they own everything,’ said Bella Rappaport, the woman ...”

“... overwhelming desire to re-establish sovereignty over the peninsula, demilitarised since the Camp David Accords. The extent of the Islamists’ deference to the military was made plain when the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood was forced to retract derogatory remarks he had made about the military’s willingness to bend to the wishes of ...”

“... she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past decade.’ David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, gets it right: ‘She seems to be smart, impressive and honest – and in her willingness to suppress so much of her mind for the sake of her career, kind of disturbing.’ Whatever her own views may ...”

“... two signature touches. The other is Reacher’s habit of solving seemingly impossible problems by means of astonishing feats of ratiocination. These tend to lean more heavily on narrative logic than on swallowable deduction: in Killing Floor he tracks down a man on the run by looking at a road map and applying the ‘universal truth’ that, given a free ...”