“... at last bring a discussion of its calamitous role into the open in the US. With the exception of Donald Rumsfeld, who conveniently did his military service in the gap between the Korean and Vietnam Wars, neither Bush nor any of the other prime movers of this war served in the military. Of course, General Colin Powell served in Vietnam, but he is well known ...”

“... wars, of which this is the third volume.* Woodward is not only granted audiences: he interviews Donald Rumsfeld, and others, at his home, in his own kitchen, over supper. If you’re Nigella-ish, you’ll be disappointed by his non-disclosure of what there was to eat.This hasn’t always been so. Woodward’s first Watergate article wasn’t about the ...”

“... stairs. An extreme example, admittedly, but Auden’s work is often unsure about the prospects of justice, poetic or otherwise. In ‘Spain 1937’ and ‘September 1, 1939’, talk of ‘the Just City’ or of a realm that exists ‘wherever the Just/Exchange their messages’ doesn’t ring true, not least because of the capital letters.Auden​ always ...”

“... bars, slashing his way through video games and death-metal lyrics, encountering a time-travelling Donald Duck. Even stranger, as a figure embraced by both the far right and the left, El Cid has also come to stand as an emblem of democracy and pluralism. Berend is writing with deicidal intent: once the myth has been fully exposed to the light of fact, she ...”

“... 2016 when Steele was reportedly paid $168,000 by an American firm called Fusion GPS to investigate Donald Trump, who had recently won the Republican presidential nomination. Fusion GPS was founded by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, former reporters for the Wall Street Journal who had made their careers out of delving into Russian corruption. The project was ...”

“... a first draft of The Idiot in the early 2000s, publishing it only in 2017 – by which point Donald Trump, a familiar figure from my youth, was somehow in charge of the United States, and Roe was under serious threat, and I, on the eve of my fortieth birthday, was going around the country promoting a ‘debut novel’ about a painful crush I had had when ...”

“... Modernists whose reputations are now rightly in rapid decline.’Such an estimate may do justice to the scale of Browning’s work. Whether it comes to terms with Browning’s actual identity as a poet is much more doubtful: for Browning’s authenticity, which is really the only thing that matters in a poet, depends, I think, on his being in fact ...”

“... completion) services.Today the union that Thatcher did so much to shape is light on social justice, tough on treasury borrowing, fixated by opening up markets to competition. If it weren’t for the electorate’s concerns over immigration, the Tory Brexiteers would look as though they were stuck in a time warp. After all, the EU long ago addressed ...”

“... Dame Lucy explains in one of her many splendid contributions, the great Oxford legal scholar and justice, William Blackstone, found ways of circumventing the legal and political restrictions, so that reforms in the Vice-Chancellor’s court, in the programme of legal studies, and in the University Press, were possible. The History is structured around ...”

“... had imagined a new England arising. Its values included a longstanding commitment to freedom and justice, a libertarian tradition of civilian courage rather than imperial state power, Hogarthian sincerity and an uncompromising contempt for aristocratic affectation. As the war ended, Goldring imagined this inspiration to be ‘retained shyly like a secret in ...”

“... a retired admiral who had served as Bush's deputy director at the CIA; and, to a lesser extent, Donald Gregg, Bush’s national security adviser and another veteran of CIA covert operations. Moreau’s team mostly worked out of a room near the National Military Command Centre on the ground floor of the Pentagon. They could also unobtrusively man a desk or ...”

“... was collected the same year in Determinations, Leavis’s first selection from the periodical. (Donald Davie described it in the LRB of 21 March 1991 as ‘one of the Leavisite demolition-jobs that truly cleared a space, and let the air in, for a more than academic public’.)Wilson doesn’t tell us in any detail what Thompson said, but ‘Our Debt to ...”

“... lists of judges who had decided on executions. People thought the new government might bring them justice.But its priorities lay elsewhere. It focused on rebranding Syria’s new leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa – who until recently had been subject to a $10 million bounty from the US. As al-Sharaa lobbied for sanctions to be lifted and for international ...”

“... to the discipline of creative writing, whose ultimate commitment is not to knowledge but to what Donald Barthelme called “Not-Knowing”’. Formed in the shadow of New Criticism, the creative writing discourse still displays ‘not a commitment to ignorance, exactly, but … a commitment to innocence’. This commitment, this sense of writing being ...”

“... on the eve of his first term as prime minister; and François Mitterrand, who as minister of justice approved the execution of at least forty Algerian nationalists during the independence struggle. A separate French protest was signed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Aragon.The king and his advisers took the view that Morocco must forge its own ...”