“... and the London Waste Ltd plant in particular, was investigated by the television journalist Richard Watson for Newsnight. A predictable story of fudging, economy with the truth, buck-passing and ministerial denial. Until August 2000, London Waste was guilty of mixing relatively safe bottom ash with the contaminated fly ash that the process was ...”

“... on Cheney’s either. The Sharon analogy speaks powerfully against Klein’s analysis. Free trade may be ‘an imperial project’, as she argues, but this does not mean that all imperial projects are primarily concerned with ‘seizing new markets directly for Western multinationals on the battlefields of pre-emptive wars’. Other goals, such as destroying ...”

“... when in reality he was just a biddable grafter like the rest. Is it possible that such critiques may rest on not having actually read much of Burke? Certainly Berlin, in his generous way, conceded in a correspondence with O’Brien that ‘I really should not argue with you about Burke. I know virtually nothing about him except what most people know – the ...”

“... but Nelson Mandela’s, shamelessly plundered from James Meek’s essay in the LRB of 26 May. Thistlewood put it more bluntly: ‘Insurrection then became a public duty.’ He did not possess a particle of Mandela’s grace and generosity, but his argument was essentially the same. As the chief justice prepared to deliver the death ...”

“... The moment had come to fix the blame where it properly belonged: not on Lyndon Johnson, not on Richard Nixon, but, as Burke points out, on the oldest story in the world, ‘the seductive woman who turns out to be a snake’. Last year, the Fonda cult allowed thousands, even millions of anguished veterans and their sympathisers to hold onto their shaky ...”

“... Mussulman manner, into the sea for infidelity, and avenged by a young Venetian, her lover’. It may be that Byron was in the nick of time to prevent a girl he had seduced from being dumped in the Aegean. The fineness of the poem does not depend on his exposure to the practice but on his deep sense of involvement with the principle. Fragment or no, ‘The ...”

“... fighting so far. In the course of the last few meetings the English had overcome whatever awe they may have had of the great Spanish array and this time they came in close, firing low at a hundred yards or less (the round-shot of the time was neither accurate nor very dangerous at over two hundred yards, but at one hundred, or as Winter of the Vanguard put it ...”

“... British manufactures out of some foreign markets. Industrial production in the UK contracted in May. At some point, it is believed, businesses will fail, throwing their workers onto the state, and the British public finances will disintegrate: a long period of prosperity will come to an end. Like all defensive alliances, the euro is also an act of ...”

“... The context had shifted radically, but their reflexes remained the same. This failure to adapt may have been to some extent self-serving. So long as America appeared seriously endangered, the neo-cons could continue to inflate their own importance, admiring and advertising themselves as the only Americans capable of understanding the formidable dimensions ...”

“... letter to an MP, ‘I cannot say free, but rather, as one brought over in a Coffin, out of which I may not peep, until the protection of this Parliament unlock it, and say, Arise Freeman and walk.’ This petitioner and his desperate associates were not confident that they would be vindicated in their appeals, even though they had one trump card up their ...”

“... broached brandy bottle is characteristic of Hughes’s practical canniness. Two months later (22 May 1956) he is telling Olwyn:I have met a first-rate American poetess. She really is good. Certainly one of the best female poets I ever read, and a damn sight better than the run of good male. Her main enthusiasm at present is me, and she thinks my verses are ...”

“... Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in his fifties. But it’s been thirty years since Richard Feynman hailed Beard’s research as ‘magic’ at the 1972 Solvay Conference, and the Beard-Einstein Conflation – the details of which are for obvious reasons left vague, though it has something to do with ‘the interaction of light with ...”

“... in French. The London puy shows no signs of having survived into Chaucer’s lifetime, but it may still have offered a model for the storytelling competition of The Canterbury Tales. Butterfield suggests too that these societies offer a context for the poetic exchanges between a number of late 14th-century French poets, perhaps extending as far as ...”

“... brevity. There are already a number of biographies of Cummings, including two very good ones − Richard Kennedy’s Dreams in the Mirror (1980) and Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno’s E.E. Cummings: A Biography (2004) − but who wants to read six hundred pages about this most unpleasant of men? Cheever struggles with Cummings’s anti-Semitism, treating it as ...”

“... or Jerusalem, was often prescribed to those hoping to be rid of leprosy, cataract or epilepsy. Richard Esty’s medical manual of 1454 includes a long pilgrim’s travel guide advising on overnight stops, exchange rates and potential routes between England and Jerusalem. Long journeys in unfamiliar circumstances, away from domestic and economic ...”