“... with the prevailing winds when it came to Mao. This put him in a tight spot during the first major purge of the People’s Republic era, which targeted Xi’s old mentor from the north-west, Gao Gang. In 1953, Gao was purged, in part as a result of Deng and Zhou’s machinations. After his subsequent suicide, Mao became convinced that Gao had been a ...”

“... Moynihan of Leeds was so well satisfied with the progress of surgery as to declare that no further major advances were to be expected. I wonder whether the success of surgery in the early decades of the century, combined with the relative impotence of medicine, was responsible for the traditional rivalry of self-esteem between physicians and surgeons, as I ...”

“... Union over the United States. Although Beauvoir always denied (unconvincingly) that the three major French characters were stand-ins for Sartre, Camus and herself, she announced that the Chicago lover was Algren. Even so, Beloved Chicago Man is a revelation. Simone de Beauvoir’s letters to Nelson Algren are, from beginning to end, among the most ...”

“... sections can be found in most bookshop chains, and independent gay bookstores can be found in most major cities in the US and UK, their shelves packed with fiction about gay and lesbian life. In two decades, a few dozen books have become many thousands, so many that the single genre of gay literature has now spawned many subgenres: in fiction alone there are ...”

“... Said says, after pointing out that ‘there was a virtual epidemic of Orientalia affecting every major poet, essayist and philosopher of the period … this is a later transposition eastwards of a similar enthusiasm in Europe for Greek and Latin antiquity during the High Renaissance.’ But the resemblance with the Renaissance ends there. The Orient, in ...”

“... of the City of London. In 1603, a quarter of a century after bricks began to be manufactured here, John Stow described its buildings as ‘filthy cottages’. Since then, the area, whether one calls it Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, Banglatown, has been a byword for poverty and violence. ‘A land of blood and beer,’ a rector of Hawksmoor’s ...”

“... to confront the North Koreans in October 2002, the Bush people turned a soluble problem into a major crisis, in which neither side had any room to back away. Now the North may have embarked on a nuclear weapons programme far beyond the CIA’s ‘one or two devices’, which would be a catastrophic defeat for American diplomacy; and no one – in ...”

“... tank in his name. Menachem Begin’s election in 1977, which brought Likud to power and heralded a major realignment in Israeli politics in the right’s favour, should have improved his prospects. But Begin, the former commander of the Irgun militia and a Jabotinsky follower, considered Bibi’s father ‘a pompous windbag who had preferred a comfortable life ...”

“... at his fanciful plots. Standardised in the mid-century US, in Astounding magazine, edited by John W. Campbell, Hard SF advertises consumer goods like personal robots and flying cars. It valorises space travel that culminates in successful (if difficult) contact with the alien life assumed to be strewn throughout the galaxies, and glows with a ...”

“... and he took to heart Eliot’s suggestion (in the 1930 preface to his translation of Saint-John Perse’s Anabase) that a poet is sometimes able to write poetry in what is called prose. In Parenthesis marries contemporary speech to the sovereignties of self-contained utterance, around which questions of genre arrange themselves as best they can. It ...”

“... on its behalf, as well as well-connected political insiders: Reagan’s national security adviser John Poindexter, the Clinton strategist James Carville and, later, the disgraced general Mike Flynn, who was Trump’s first national security adviser. Former US government and intelligence officials were hired to fill executive and advisory roles. In 2009, the ...”

“... practice of political justice, both in the present and across time. It also connects with another major aspect of Hill’s work: his sense of obligation and debt to earlier English writers. The evolution of his work is indeed best understood through his changing relationships with past poets. Hill is the grammar-school-educated son of a policeman from ...”

“... this ‘love of the limelight’, but there is surely more to it than that. A man I once met, a major donor to the Democratic Party, told me of being invited to have dinner with Bill Clinton at the White House, where he and his wife also stayed the night. He was amazingly taken with Clinton, astounded by his warmth and intellect, and flattered by his ...”

“... respect from the prominent British child analysts Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby. Questions were asked about the significance of the father in child development, and family therapy opened up the family as a system rather than a cult of personality. At the same time we were encouraged to believe that everything depended on what the ...”

“... where, with what he came to consider a ‘hysterical disregard for practicality’, he decided to major in French. For his English classes he wrote Firbankian short stories in a manner an unsympathetic tutor described as ‘rococo’, derived from ‘self-consciousness and reading’ and in some instances made ‘more than usually irritating by meagre content ...”