“... office in an age of strongmen, between Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory in 1979 and Robert Mugabe’s in 1980. Thirty-six years later Dos Santos is still in power. Under his supervision, Angola is not just a development star, but a model of elite self-enrichment and wealth disparity. There are now said to be ...”

“... the mark of a town on its knees. To lose its high street is a bitter blow to a place’s sense of self-worth, but the collapse of traditional small retailers is hardly a mystery, when a shining, ample Morrisons sucks up shoppers in the heart of town, and retail warehouses and Amazon take most of the rest.Millions of pounds’ worth of regeneration money was ...”

“... the efforts of some of the Founding Fathers, but penal codes were dramatically revised and made self-consciously less bloody than those of the mother country. The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibiting ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ is another sign of the Founding Fathers’ commitment to the idea that a new sort of liberal polity demanded ...”

“... Levertov found something chilling about her command on the page, an ugliness in her aristocratic self-assurance: ‘You know, actually those dashes bother me,’ she wrote to Robert Duncan in 1961. ‘There’s something cold and perversely smug about E.D. that has always rebuffed my feeling for individual poems … She ...”

“... downward thrust of Asian Communism’ detected by the Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies). That Communism was somehow involved in the war was not news, but out of politeness I wrote ‘Munich?’ in my notebook. Already shopworn by 1966, the Munich analogy never dies. It puts Hitler on the other side. Attleboro produced impressive ...”

“... Here is the Conservative chancellor, George Osborne: We choose aspiration. This budget backs the self-employed, the small business owner and the homebuyer. We choose families. This budget helps hardworking people keep more of the money they have earned. His boss, David Cameron, criticising Labour in Parliament last month: They met with a bunch of migrants ...”

“... It is hard to think of a figure more reviled in the West than Robert Mugabe. Liberal and conservative commentators alike portray him as a brutal dictator, and blame him for Zimbabwe’s descent into hyperinflation and poverty. The seizure of white-owned farms by his black supporters has been depicted as a form of thuggery, and as a cause of the country’s declining production, as if these lands were doomed by black ownership ...”

“... is the second part of a two-part interview. Part 1: ‘You Muddy Fools’ I want to ask you about Robert Lowell: as an influence on your work, that is, and only then as what he later became – a ‘Life’, the subject of your first full-length biography. You did and do admire him greatly as a poet, yet in his poetic practice didn’t he trample all over the ...”

“... again. The West, in its containment of Russia, has guaranteed not only the independence but the self-defined territorial integrity of Russia’s western neighbours. This could well mean supporting their revenge and reconquest in places lost to them thirty years ago – sometimes with good reason. Ilya BudraitskisThousands​  of people have taken to the ...”

“... of an earlier time, for some reason: Henty, Ballantyne, that sort of thing. There were lots of self-educating books, home encyclopedias, home university courses, Pelmanism manuals, self-improvement tracts – volumes that were all in the grand, glass-fronted bookcase. Therein lay knowledge. Therein lay my father’s ...”

“... a security firm, with a website offering the chance to go on the ‘ultimate jihad challenge’, a self-defence training course in America. The offer was only ever taken up by one person, a security guard from Sainsbury’s. Sulayman attracted the attention of Special Branch and MI5, who made several attempts to recruit him as an agent. After 11 September the ...”

“... the bodies of your friends. Jarman made a note in his diary in April 1989: ‘Since autumn: Terry, Robert, David, Ken, Paul, Howard. All the brightest and best trampled to death – surely even the Great War brought no more loss into one life in just 12 months, and all this as we made love not war.’ In March 1992: ‘We talked of the people who died of Aids ...”

“... a provision granting Montenegro the right to call a referendum on independence, premised on a ‘self-determination’ clause that had been drafted into the Yugoslav constitution of 1990, itself never ratified. The EU succeeded only in requiring that Đukanović delay the poll by three years – he would wait four – and raise the threshold to 55 per cent ...”

“... she might fancy. This commission caused him some anxiety. Well-read up to a point, he was largely self-taught, his reading tending to be determined by whether an author was gay or not. Fairly wide remit though this was, it did narrow things down a bit, particularly when choosing a book for someone else, and the more so when that someone else happened to be ...”

“... harm from every point of view. The lack of dignity, the utter squalor and contemptible lack of self-control are really too horrible to contemplate.’ Coward, who never came out, appears torn between compassion, blame and the vehement disgust of columnists like John Gordon, who feasted on the case. He seems to own a vague idea of tactics towards legal ...”