“... moles. This seems to me wrong-headed in several different ways. The key judgment is surely that of William Strang, the Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, in a paper of May 1943: We need Russian collaboration. The conclusion of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty marks our decision that this must be our policy … even if fears that Russia lay a ‘heavy ...”

“... they were brought up, sons of a bucket-maker? There is much incidental play with a local poet – William Westlake – who lived, went mad and died in the early 19th century and who seems to be based on John Clare, an artist tragically unable to integrate his peasant heritage with his London authorial self. Lavish stretches of Westlake verse are invented to ...”

“... appetite for ever further tit-bits about the ‘Cambridge Comintern’. No sooner was the long hunt for the ‘third man’ settled (with the defection of Philby) than a further breathless search for the ‘fourth man’ began. Finally Blunt was run down. Almost immediately we are off on the chase for the fifth man (Rees?) and perhaps even a sixth (Sir ...”

“... paper that although one of her professors at Stanford had been Clinton’s defence secretary, William Perry, her ‘dream job’ was to be national security adviser. She knew Korean and was studying Mandarin: as a student she had published articles about North Korean counterfeiters and smuggling networks. So on paper she fitted in with all the other ...”

“... the world. For example, money from what was called the ‘M-Fund’ (named after Major-General William Marquat of MacArthur’s staff) was secretly employed to pay for Japan’s initial rearmament after the outbreak of the Korean War, since the Japanese Diet itself refused to appropriate money for the purpose. The various uses to which these funds were put ...”

“... Walsingham that ‘the northwest passage is a matter nothing doubtful.’ Thirty years later, William Baffin wrote to one of his financial backers that ‘there is no passage nor hope of passage.’ Baffin did see a lot of whales though, and most of the ships that sailed to the Arctic from Europe in the 17th century were whalers, heading ever further ...”

“... are newcomers to MoMA).* Elderfield has worked in P&S for years, under the directorships of both William Rubin (1973-88) and Kirk Varnedoe (1988-2000). Yet Elderfield’s final show in the old building, Modern Starts (2000), was cause for concern: a post-historical hodgepodge of disparate works placed together in lookalike groupings under such generic titles ...”

“... own hounds, thereby becoming an early victim of, as it were, friendly fire. It’s not quite The Hunt for Red October, but the quest for Astrid/Artemis in a warring world has enough suspenseful twists and turns, set against many thousand miles of continuously changing geography, to keep the novel racing. Kellas’s travels, by ...”

“... of a small sect who call themselves ‘ethical’ or ‘vegetarian’ vampires, having elected to hunt wild animals instead of feeding off human blood. Edward loves Bella too; but he can barely let himself even kiss her, for fear of ‘losing control’, squashing her to death in his super-powered passion – ‘I could reach out, meaning to touch your ...”

“... a cousin and former lover of the once successful but now forgotten Victorian historical novelist William Ainsworth. The deadliness of Ainsworth’s prose is a running joke, and it enables several asides of the ‘don’t whatever you do write a historical novel’ kind, as well as various self-conscious observations about the horrors of literary ...”

“... by means of a lengthy epistolary sub-text. Hubbard, ‘on station’ with the real-life E. Howard Hunt in Uruguay, writes long confessional letters to Kittredge, Harlot’s much younger and brighter wife and a classic Georgetown bluestocking. One sees the point of going behind Harlot’s back, but this exchange is improbably arch and overly literal, bashing ...”

“... seen as deprived. Since his theme here is a writer’s destruction of his private self by the hunt for status, the dramatist has to take the self-evidently less successful partner, the poet’s wife, as the feeling centre of the play (the result reverses, that is, such images as we meet in Henry James’s stories of artists with ruthless and worldly ...”

“... subpoenaed by Mueller. Some protection may be afforded Trump by his nominee as attorney general, William Barr, a right-wing Republican who believes in a strong chief executive; on 14 February Barr was confirmed by the Republican Senate, and he will work to keep Trump in office. The interesting question is whether he will allow the Mueller findings to be ...”

“... reinscribes the theory. When Terry Eagleton, for instance, in his erratic and self-regarding William Shakespeare,† declares that ‘from a phallocentric viewpoint a woman appears to have nothing between her legs,’ and sets up his account of the great tragedies by stressing man’s ‘unconscious thoughts of his own possible castration’ – so that ...”

“... The Revenger’s Tragedy, 1606) and John Fletcher. In his Jew’s Tragedy, written in the 1620s, William Heminges even includes the line ‘To be, or not to be, I, there’s the doubt.’ Perhaps he thought that as the son of one of the compilers of the 1623 Shakespeare folio, which prints a more streamlined and performance-friendly revised text of Hamlet ...”