“... The American author of the words, Anna Walker, is invoking the declaration of Christ himself (John 9:4): ‘I must work the works of Him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.’ Good works in this general sense could be performed by an invalid Evangelical lady, flat on her back but radiating piety. There has, however, been ...”

“... the dreams that attached themselves to him. In choosing ‘a well-rounded life’ as his subtitle, John Campbell risks some obvious jibes about his increasingly portly subject, but he delivers on its promise. It is a persuasive, if at times indulgent, portrait of a life rich in satisfactions. At its heart were a long, close marriage and three children, to ...”

“... and looking just like paint thinner or gasoline.And then there’s the aerial footage taken by John Wathen, or Hurricane Creekkeeper, that’s gone viral on YouTube, Facebook, other facets of the internet, and the media, including CNN. It shows great plumes of smoke rising from the sea, as the oil is burned off the surface. The flames are invisible but the ...”

“... Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but had avoided clear-cut pronouncements on most major issues. Democrats bridled at the thought of Thomas as Thurgood Marshall’s successor, but, when interrogated, the nominee simply stonewalled. He stated, incredibly, that he had never expressed a view about Roe v. Wade in conversation with ...”

“... a visionary monologue notionally addressed to a love-object, though her reality is pretty foggy. John Stuart Mill read the poem attentively in preparation for a review which never appeared, although Browning did later get to see his notes and was understandably struck by one of Mill’s sharper comments: ‘The writer seems to me possessed with a more ...”

“... Sturm und Drang was the price of breaking the sound barrier that separated Promising Upstart from Major League Sensation, and there was way more money in the bigs. What was flummoxing for Roth was finding his name and his protagonist turned into punchline material. He didn’t share the mirth of his countrymen and women when Jacqueline Susann, author of ...”

“... X when he ghosted his autobiography? To what extent did Ted Sorensen create the verbal manner of John F. Kennedy when he wrote Profiles in Courage, a book for which the future president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in ...”

“... land can be sold to the Jews without dispossessing Arab cultivators,’ the High Commissioner, Sir John Chancellor, wrote to George V in 1930. ‘Only in a very few places in our colonisation,’ Ben Gurion said at a Zionist Congress in 1937, ‘were we not forced to transfer the earlier residents.’ Clearly, Israel’s first Prime Minister did not think that ...”

“... in a bitter final chapter, ‘has not honoured the pain of our people in its politics’. John Jeffrey, the current deputy minister of justice, told him in September 2017 that turning a blind eye to the murder of the Cradock Four and others such as the activist Steve (Bantu) Biko ‘was the price that had to be paid’. Partly for budgetary ...”

“... though for me it spoils the ‘line’ of the poem – was reinstated at the petitioning of John Berryman in For the Union Dead (1964); a revised version of that is printed as a separate poem called ‘Ovid and Caesar’s Daughter’ in History (1973); and now Bidart and Gewanter have unearthed a seven-stanza monster that was printed in the Kenyon ...”

“... idea of international regimes as arrangements assuring co-operative economic relations between the major industrial states, which might or might not take the form of treaties. These, it was held, developed out of US leadership after the Second World War, but superseded it with the formation of a consensual framework of mutually satisfactory transactions ...”

“... the same racial issues. Composed by Bubber Miley and Ellington, it comprises two minor and major blues choruses. Miley’s mournful second plunger solo, following Nanton’s, concludes by unexpectedly quoting Chopin’s Funeral March, a readily identifiable allusion. (The solos may well have been composed to begin with, or written out after an initial ...”

“... Vietnam? Despite more than a thousand books and endless finger-pointing and breast-beating by the major American participants, no satisfactory account of what transpired there has yet appeared. Missing pieces of the puzzle, long hidden in the US archives, are now being declassified. Even more to the point, the key role of Mao’s China in arming and guiding ...”

“... for instance, she provides a lively account of the intricate emotional manoeuvres performed by John Banks’s splendidly over-the-top costume drama The Island Queens (banned under Charles II in 1684, rewritten and rehabilitated under Anne as The Albion Queens, 1704), during which Mary and her victorious antitype Elizabeth enjoy the first of their many ...”

“... an appropriate shaping in the materials, which merely follow a loose chronological sequence. The major events of Barbara Pym’s life were probably the acceptance of her first novel in 1950, the rejection of her seventh in 1963, and her ‘rediscovery’ in 1977. Appropriately, the latter or post-1950 part of the book is in the nature of excerpts from a ...”