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“... covers the Middle East but not Algeria, he pulls no punches. ‘Reporters,’ he writes, ‘know King Fahd to be lazy, corrupt, ignorant and a drunk, but little is written about these things and he is still the West’s man.’ Prince Sultan, the Saudi Defence Minister, is one of the Kingdom’s biggest ‘skimmers’, making billions out of arms ...”

“... of Allied troops to be flung ashore in France to establish a Second Front. In this respect Michael Foot was more gung-ho than Churchill, who feared a massacre on the beaches. One quality that did distinguish Churchill from many other figures in British public life was a brooding consciousness of the war as another stage in the descent of the 20th ...”

“... in the harsh translation by G.S. Fraser in the New Directions Selected Poems: ‘God Save the King’ the trumpets moan and groan From a pavilion high on piles That gape to let the sea through when it comes To wash out wet Horse-hoofmarks on the sand Of this sea-shore. Coldly the wind claws me But a burning light snakes along the windows And white mica ...”

“... collection of misfits in a bar change emotional partners and dance through the night.’ (Yes, and King Lear chooses his friends unwisely and gets lost in bad weather.) And history is rewritten. The File quotes Williams’s preface to Camino Real: ‘I only know that I have felt a release in this work which I wanted you to feel with me.’ The trouble is, the ...”

“... and by amusing her family with assorted comic turns, such as a belched version of ‘God Save the King’. Even as a tot, George stuck close to her sophisticated, largely homosexual coterie, and would sometimes be dug out of bed to delight them with his imitations of louche popular singers. He often didn’t know what they meant, he says, ‘but I had ...”

“... our hero believes ‘that a daring feat of arms in the service of public order’ will allow the King of Spain to place him ‘in a position more to [his] liking’. He has a special advantage in this mission. He knows Vicuña, who worked for him when he was pacifying the Indians – or rather, worked for the Indians though he was nominally in the service of ...”

“... on which/ships etch the lines of shining poems’; ‘should such a splendid upright shape, a king,/be made a horizontal form, a line of print?’ In 163 poems, there are 30 references to ‘poetry’ or ‘poems’, which seems to me too many. The prose, at the same time, has fallen for the dubious attractions of the word ‘splendid’, which has always ...”

“... book in English), and becomes a leading literary figure of the emigration. Mary appears in 1926, King, Queen, Knave in 1928, The Defence in 1929, The Eye in 1930, Glory in 1931, Laughter in the Dark in 1932, Despair in 1934, Invitation to a Beheading in 1935, most of The Gift in 1937. He doesn’t get a job in Paris or London, but he does lots of ...”

“... prophetic books has recently been called into question in a way which has largely confounded Michael Foot’s purpose in writing The History of Mr Wells. It is clear that Foot first conceived his biography as a celebration of Wells’s socialism – more particularly his ‘libertarian’ socialism, which Foot takes to be healthier than the ...”

“... showing how Protestant ideals influenced the middle-class constitutionalism of Opposition MPs. Michael Walzer went further in his Revolution of the Saints by arguing that Calvinism was a modernising ideology. With breathtaking audacity, he leapt from case-studies of Marian exiles to New Model soldiers belting out battle hymns, in pursuit of his thesis that ...”

“... but the daily rite of time and precision is still enacted. This nugget of information from Michael Young and Tom Schuller’s Life after Work* is both moving and symbolic. Greenwich was the chosen area of their enquiry into what happens to us after we stop clocking in. As one with a year or so to go, I found their survey gripping. Time, which you obey ...”

“... the limited wars which once claimed only a small percentage of the budget. In the Defence Yearbook Michael Clarke repeats what everyone knows: although ‘the Army, in particular, may lament the fact that Bosnia – like the Northern Ireland commitment – detracts from the real business of training for a major war, the fact is that the prospect of major war ...”

“... to ‘discover’ extinction in the sense of gaining actual experience of the phenomenon. But, as Michael Neill points out, human beings do imagine dying and in the process they inevitably invent a notion of death capable of matching their presuppositions. To that extent, death could be said to be something that each society discovers for itself. As a ...”

“... Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. The American Century details J. Edgar Hoover’s personal and the FBI’s institutional linking of white supremacist and anti-Communist hysterias, to which America’s national police devoted far more ...”

“... god of writing appears to an early Pharaoh holding his new invention, the hieroglyphic script. The king tells the god to take it away, because it would ruin his subjects’ powers of memory and concentration, and fill them with the delusion that they knew things when they did not. The Pharaoh may have had a point, but Plato was not above being ...”