“... So it comes as a bigger shock than the salmonella scare (Edwina Currie, 1988) or the BSE scare (John Selwyn Gummer, 1990) to hear the latest strand in the table talk: that the era of endless food is winding down.This belief is new. Until recently the discussion was largely about quality. Quantity and availability only entered the picture when we wondered ...”

“... economies as Spain and Ireland, where construction has been the linchpin of recent growth. In the major Eurozone economies, on the other hand, where mortgages are not so central to financial markets, such effects have been more subdued. But, as the exposure of European banks to the collapse of sub-prime markets in the US is currently showing, the lines of ...”

“... Green Monster, Baxter the Bobcat, the Mariner Moose and other giant furry creatures who accompany major-league baseball teams from game to game, Palin is the adored mascot of the anti-fiscal crowd. Her actual performance as mayor and governor counts for little beside her capacity to keep the fans happy during the intervals between play, which she does in the ...”

“... operators to space warfighters’. But the vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, John E. Hyten, has described space war as ‘inevitable’.The American strategeion sees itself as waging a constant battle against complacency. To ward this off, the political class periodically conjures up imminent threats to US superiority. In the 1990s the ...”

“... problem, possibly mental collapse. ‘If you come he would not know you,’ Frances wrote to Fr John O’Connor, the priest who had inspired the character of Father Brown.After G.K. slowly recovered, Cecil enlisted. In the New Witness he had been trying to keep up with the Daily Mail, warning of potential treachery from hotel-owners with Jewish and ...”

“... aristocracy, his contempt for all other classes, and his pleasure in reaction. But then, so John Bayley observed, they move an amendment. In order to explain these aberrations, they explain that Waugh was a disillusioned romantic. Graham Greene wrote that ‘he is a romantic in the sense of having a dream which failed him’: his first marriage, the ...”

“... of near misses, such as when Louis, the French Dauphin, was offered the English throne after King John’s death and was cheered through the streets of London before being defeated in the Battle of Lincoln in May 1217 and then the Battle of Sandwich in August, perhaps the first ever battle fought by sailing ships in the open sea.Even the fiasco of the last ...”

“... Spender’s son Matthew was ten years old, he caught his hand in a car door. ‘The event,’ John Sutherland writes, ‘recalled other tragedies in the boy’s little life; the running over, for example, of his dog Bobby – a "rather lugubrious looking spaniel” and a present from his godmother, Edith Sitwell. Six-year-old Matthew had been disappointed ...”

“... on pop criticism: worship of lyrics as ‘poetry’, modelled on pop’s least representative major figure. This sort of writing fails the reality of pop: its special alchemy of lyrics that look like junk on the page, and music that seems underdeveloped when transcribed to a musical staff. Then there is the curse of arid musicology; and of Rolling ...”

“... United States must be masters of this weapon of the future,’ concluded the officer in charge, Major-General A.M. Cameron. But by the criteria of conventional artillery, the V2s were found to be hopelessly inaccurate. The invention of the A-bomb, and then in 1952 of the H-bomb, transformed rocket research. The first delivery system commissioned for the ...”

“... leaves a conscientious biographer in a bit of a pickle. What to do with a subject – especially a major historical subject – who seems to lack a grown-up interior life? Who offers little but stagey poses, a hand languidly flung to brow, or a lot of specious business with a handkerchief? A century on, it’s as if Bernhardt were still daring us to make sense ...”

“... thought of calling it a ‘hub’, has been struggling for months, with services discontinued and major elements hidden behind fences, while corporate mouthpieces attempt to justify the station’s fortunate position as a satellite of London’s tallest building. Shardenfreude. London Bridge station is now an embarrassed and aggressively apologetic commuter ...”

“... Bellow was bigger game. With Bellow, Atlas was climbing up to the high diving board, essaying a major artist – one still foxily alert and alive, whose reputation had just enjoyed a late-stage booster shot with the publication of Ravelstein – and sunning in his hero’s reflected glory. Atlas and Bellow had much in common: Chicago, Jewishness, an ...”

“... that the natural harbour at the mouth of the Johor River had two centuries earlier served as a major port for the sultanate of Johor (and before that as trading post for the Java-based Majapahit empire). Singapore, the port on the Johor River, was not his first choice for an experiment in enlightened colonial rule – he would have preferred to inherit ...”

“... Signs of the Times similarly notes the ‘disquieting fact that the number of students electing to major in literature has steadily declined over the last twenty years’. The question of ‘theory’ is bound up with this, since, in Lehman’s view, it seems probable ‘that the student with an authentic literary vocation may be the one who feels least at ...”