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“... mode, there was the comic paranoia of ‘A Dream of Judgment’ (‘Posterity, thy name is Samuel Johnson’), where the Doctor delivers infallible negatives on the poet’s work – what else should a Scot expect? – and the fine satire ‘A Poem in Praise of the British’, where the tatters of Empire drift through the dreams of ‘old pederasts on the ...”

“... of it is familiar, the titles of the films not least: Chelsea Girls, Nude Restaurant, and, with Paul Morrissey taking the upper hand, Flesh, Trash and Heat. Warhol, the voyeur, made everyone else into one. Life turned into a collapsed art; a matter of makeup, sleeping, fucking, giggling, doing drugs, sitting in kitchens all day, fucking again. Daily life at ...”

“... partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff selected, engage with the question of how a story convinces us of its reality. This is not to say that the stories Wolff selected were not interesting stories. Rather, it became abundantly clear that he had ...”

“... can detect echoes of his jaundiced vision in Jordan Peele’s recent horror film, Get Out, and in Paul Beatty’s novel The Sellout. But, as if it were his destiny to remain just beyond the pale of literary approval, Himes, unlike Baldwin, flunks the contemporary ‘woke’ test. As much as he deplored the prejudices of the black bourgeoisie and aligned ...”

“... there can be no place for the ‘good madness’ which Screech ascribes to Christ and St Paul. Against such wide-ranging claims, Digby takes the prudent course of attempting to construct a detailed picture of the regime in operation at the Retreat. She shows that mechanical forms of restraint were used, though sparingly, throughout the first fifty ...”

“... Latinist provides the drama. In 1766, appalled by the bad Latin in James Boswell’s legal thesis, Johnson commented: ‘Ruddiman is dead.’ That great Scottish Latinist had corrected students’ work until his death, nine years earlier. For Johnson, Thomas Ruddiman’s departure meant the end of an age in Scotland, at ...”

“... to Berkshire or Heathrow, via Central London, without getting off the train. On 13 March, Boris Johnson fired up the first thousand-tonne tunnel-boring machine. This beast – a toothed slug called Phyllis (after Phyllis Pearsall, who created the London A-Z), which is the length of 14 buses – is now chugging its way through the soil from Royal Oak to ...”

“... and behaviour. Sperry began to look at the development of this apparatus in a school dominated by Paul Weiss and a romantic view of nerve cells. It has been thought that nerve cells gently argued out their final destiny in the manner of a Vienna café klatsch. A Yankee from Connecticut, Sperry repeated a very simple experiment which had been done by Stone at ...”

“... Democratic Unionist Party, Jeffrey Donaldson, instructed the first minister of Northern Ireland, Paul Givan, to resign. This automatically also removed the deputy first minister, Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill, from office, effectively bringing about the collapse of the power-sharing administration. Donaldson claimed to be protesting at the failure of the ...”

“... the judges ill-suited. His views are to be found set out in the well-known decision of Kruse v. Johnson (1898), and it has a strong contemporary ring. The case concerned the validity of bylaws promulgated by a local council. For years Victorian judges had become inured to scrutinising such laws very closely, and to striking them down if they were judged ...”

“... happy consequences.) Judging from his hawkish counsel during the 13 days of the crisis, Lyndon Johnson was less impressed by Tuchman. But when Kennedy was assassinated he too had the First World War in mind, arguing that what happened in Dallas could plausibly be as badly misconstrued as the murder in Sarajevo had been fifty years earlier. A comparable ...”

“... continent, but a place so bare and sterile he called it Desolation Island. The name provides Jean-Paul Kauffmann with the title of the second of his travel books to be translated into English. The first, The Dark Room at Longwood, recorded a visit to St Helena (‘the middle of nowhere’), the scene of Napoleon’s final exile and death. Voyage to Desolation ...”

“... compared Hillary Clinton’s defeat to watching Joan of Arc burning at the stake. Obama was in St Paul, Minnesota, pointedly in the very arena where the Republicans will hold their convention in September, at times barely audible over the nearly continual cheering of 17,000 fans (with another 15,000 listening outside). Clinton was off on what has come to be ...”

“... Old English as well as the language of Robert Browning (‘Oh, to be in England’), Linton Kwesi Johnson (‘Inglan is a Bitch’) and T.S. Eliot (‘History is now and England’). I had got as far as setting out the rationale for such a book in a lecture at the British Academy when the Penguin and Oxford anthologies of English verse edited respectively by ...”