“... The supposed military success has revived the previously languishing campaign of the hawkish John McCain, who will now almost certainly be his party’s candidate for the presidency. Seldom has the official Iraqi and American perception of what is happening in Iraq felt so different from the reality. Barricaded behind the walls of the Green ...”

“... why he was recruited by MI6. He was a natural. Hamilton McMillan (‘Mac’), an old Balliol chum, took him aside for the traditional sounding out. The chain of clothes shops, AnnaBelinda Ltd, in which Marks had an interest, could be used as safe-houses, dead letter drops; could expand into Romania and Czechoslovakia. Belinda was the wife of the eccentric ...”

“... if politically marginal, 1968 movement, eventually founding his own ‘anti-theatre’. He took the Antiteatr’s coterie of waifs and strays with him into cinema, making three or four films a year between 1969 and his early death in 1982. Very roughly, his career can be divided into three phases: early minimalist films noirs such as The American ...”

“... out, these concerns are not new. In 1875, less than ten years after the movement was founded, Sir John Strachey, a senior British colonialist, asked his colleague John Palmer to infiltrate the madrasa at Deoband and to report back on what he found there. Having taken a look Palmer concluded: ‘there cannot be a better ...”

“... of popular music, spinning the Beatles in a new direction. Meeting Shankar changed things for John Coltrane, too, helping him shake his dependence on drugs, while opening his ears to Eastern scales. Before Philip Glass worked with Shankar on a film score in 1965, he had been churning out unremarkable pastiches of French neoclassicism fused with folksy ...”

“... 1775-83, when the 13 American colonies sought to secede from Britain, most African Americans who took up arms did so on behalf of King George III (having been promised emancipation for doing so). By contrast, in the Civil War, the overwhelming majority who took up arms fought for the United States (the Confederacy having ...”

“... diaries, which Tynan bequeathed on his deathbed to his daughter Tracy. They have been edited by John Lahr, the perfect choice for the task – indeed, an inescapable one. Lahr is Tynan’s true successor at the New Yorker, reviewing theatre for the magazine, as did Tynan, and, more important, filling his loafers as its premier celebrity profile writer, its ...”

“... federal Republic will be indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself,’ John Quincy Adams wrote when he was Secretary of State, at the time of the Monroe Doctrine, and even those who didn’t want to be part of the US but wanted independence from Spain looked to American democracy for a better system of government and often went into ...”

“... with her friend Katherine. They wrote it most evenings in the desolate hours between the end of John Craven’s Newsround and the arrival of the ice-cream van on their housing estate, a period marked by the combustion of chip pans in the kitchens of the negligent, pans then carried hurriedly onto doorsteps and thrown into the air like torches at a Viking ...”

“... was extremely important in sustaining the personally not very confident young Day-Lewis as he took his first steps towards his chosen career of being ‘a poet’. The most important thing Day-Lewis did at Oxford was to meet Auden, three years his junior but already behaving like a fully-ordained hierophant. Together they edited Oxford Poetry 1927, and ...”

“... a painter three times her age; they separated within ten months. Three years after that, she took up with the architect Edward William Godwin. They did not marry, but had a daughter and son together, and the expense of their upkeep drove her back to the stage. Her performance as Portia in The Merchant of Venice drew her to the attention of Henry ...”

“... Given the rules for speaking from the floor – once only on any given subject – the real action took place in committees or in the committee of the whole, where the Commons enforced a prohibition against note-taking. All of this served a purpose. It was intended to allow individuals to speak their mind without concern for ‘popularity’: people outside ...”

“... Napoleonic Wars, a patriotic mythology fixated on the achievements of Nelson, Wellington and Sir John Moore at Corunna tends to filter out fear and uncertainty in favour of a seemingly inevitable procession of victories. As Jenny Uglow stresses in her gripping account of Britain during the Napoleonic era, contemporaries had no such feeling of security. There ...”

“... early 14th-century ‘Earth upon Earth’, to which Smith devotes an entire chapter:Earth took of earth earth with woeEarth other earth to the earth drewEarth laid earth in earthen troughThen had earth of earth, earth enough.All is reduced to the stuff of our mortality, mentioned 12 times in 27 words. But what exactly do they mean? For all its Saxon ...”

“... In​ the mid-seventh century, a busy and well-connected abbess in Northumbria took a promising new poet under her wing. This unassuming elderly man, who worked as a cowherd, had never managed to learn a single song. He went to feasts with the other agricultural workers at the monastery, but always left before the harp could be passed to him ...”