“... Obama sought an effect of comparable solemnity in the speech of 26 August that declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq. In it he announced that the Iraq war ‘has made America safer’. Doubtless he felt a need, as he called the war to an official close, to appease and comfort the soldiers and their families who had sacrificed so much, but the ...”

“... pleasures was ‘taking the salute of other soldiers’. According to the entry for Faulkner in John Sutherland’s brilliantly entertaining Lives of the Novelists, Faulkner probably never took to the air.4 ‘What comes to mind,’ Sutherland writes, ‘is the raving George IV on his deathbed, convinced he had fought gallantly at the Battle of Waterloo ...”

“... goes without saying that it is essential to be in France’ – and Joseph Wechsberg did major damage to the magazine’s expenses budget by explaining what Michelin stars meant and then filing reports from every one of France’s three-star establishments. Alice B. Toklas wrote her Cookbook, she said, ‘for America’, partly to explain the ...”

“... 1934 (and was naturalised in 1938), it was taken semi-jocularly in many literary quarters to be a major item in that ongoing ‘punishment of England’ (‘Gott strafe England’) that had been on the German agenda since 1914.The composer Hanns Eisler records a meeting between Brecht and Zweig in London. Brecht, who ‘of course never read a line of ...”

“... is partly because some of their number – Arthur Balfour, George Curzon and Wyndham – enjoyed major political careers, and partly because they generated an abundance of high-class anecdote, diligently archived by their descendants. They have, though, been rather unlucky in their champions, starting with themselves. In old age they struggled to justify ...”

“... McAllester and Anderson feature in each other’s books and both spend time eating with John Burns, the New York Times correspondent whom they describe frequently as the ‘doyen’ or the ‘veteran’ of the press pack. They describe the same briefings, the same riverside search for a downed American pilot, the same wait for B-52s flying from ...”

“... of statistical and historical information (plot summary, percentage of the play spoken by each major character, percentages of verse and prose, probable date, sources, nature of early texts): these are boxed as ‘Key Facts’. The very words are like a knell: suddenly one begins to wonder whether those yellow boards were designed to co-ordinate with ...”

“... was a tough-minded drive to find mechanical explanations. When England’s greatest living poet, John Milton, wanted to explain why we are as we are, he retold the ancient story of Adam’s sin and consequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden. When Alexander Pope wrote his Essay on Man in the following century he took care to parallel his work with ...”

“... Dinner” praised the work of local newspapers.’ Such was the alert from the US branch of a major international anti-censorship institution. Four weeks earlier, PEN announced that its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award, which went to Charlie Hebdo in 2015, would be given in 2017 to the two million persons who participated in the women’s march ...”

“... tones, while falling far short of withdrawing their support for Trump. Listening to Paul Ryan, John McCain, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Orrin Hatch inveigh against the evil of white supremacy, you might have thought they’d just dusted off their copies of Between the World and Me. They can hardly claim to have been shocked by Trump’s response, however. As ...”

“... from being skilled ‘human computers’ – basically people doing calculations – to making major scientific contributions: documenting the birth of new stars, working out what the stars are actually made of (surprise: almost all hydrogen and helium) and devising ways to measure distances across space. This all began happening at a time when American ...”

“... generations, are titled ‘painters’ in the archive. We have a single surviving contract for a major work, from the period round 1500 when Hieronymus had grown into a force to be reckoned with – a Last Judgment commissioned by Philip the Fair. The work no longer exists. In the case of all Bosch’s surviving masterpieces – the Haywain and Adoration of ...”

“... by the early 1970s, as the historian of management consulting Christopher McKenna has argued, the major firms had ‘quite literally decentralised most of the large companies in Europe’. To keep their profits flowing in, management consultants turned to big state institutions, reorganising government departments, conducting industrial studies and evaluating ...”

“... all who promoted evil in this country.’ We were at Mar-a-Lago for the premiere of a film about John Eastman, one of the lawyers who tried to overturn the 2020 election results. Buses were bringing in guests from the Hilton West Palm Beach; ‘red-carpet opportunities’ with Rudy Giuliani had been advertised. The film came out on the anniversary of the ...”

“... wrote to James anticipating a ‘glorious empire’ to be known as ‘Great Britain or Britannia Major’. In Scotland, the Presbyterian historian David Hume recommended a supreme council of Britannia. Two union flags were designed (one with the Scottish saltire on top of the St George’s Cross; another with it underneath). The English Parliament was ...”