“... of personal history and the pretty stuff on the public record. Let’s take the spirit of J. Michael Lennon’s ‘double life’ of Norman Mailer and offer that doubleness back as subjective criticism. Mailer, after all, gave us the non-fiction novel, Lennon gives us the pseudo-objective biography, so why can’t I offer the confessional review? On the ...”

“... home in the person of the 19th-century (Irish?) artist and painter of ‘native Americans’, George Catlin, whose Rushes through the Middle graces the cover of Madoc. Oh, and one other thing. The narrative is sectioned-off into short, mostly self-contained poems, each given the name of a philosopher or quasi-philosopher (such as Frederick the Great or ...”

“... a state of emotional paralysis, and resolved that with a fatal jump from a window. Of tough-guy George Bancroft, for a few years Mr Underworld supreme and then, to his bewilderment, totally eclipsed by Cagney and co as gangster films hit their stride. Of a child-star called Baby Richard Headrick: dunked in a fountain thirty times in an afternoon, shivering ...”

“... In all these works, the individual’s enemy is the undistinguishable mass, and indeed ever since George Romero it’s en masse that the zombies have come. The zombie has turned into the Malthusian monster, a symbol of over-population and our promised ‘extinction event’, something that will take us from being the swarm overrunning the planet back to the ...”

“... in his committee. Helms, a longtime supporter of Reagan’s Star Wars project, is hopeful that George W. Bush will be elected President in November. Bush supports the development of a robust NMD system, regardless of any violation of the ABM treaty. Al Gore, realising that he could lose votes by appearing soft on defence – and campaign contributions from ...”

“... suicide note. I have never been so cheerily suicidal, so sui-Seidel. I am too cheery to be well. George Bush is cheery as well. I am cheeriest Crawling around on all fours eating gentle grass And pretending I am eating broken glass. Then I throw up the pasture. Both Plath and Lowell practised something like this detonation of historical pain in the service ...”

“... of the ‘axis of evil’. After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Kim Jong Il speculated that George W. Bush would not have gone to war had Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons. The North Korean dictator’s continued presence in Pyongyang suggests that he was right about this. Two years ago, North Korea renounced its 1994 ‘agreed framework’ with ...”

“... triumph of the cult of personality is that it can expose its emptiness without losing its magic. Michael Rogin’s brilliant collection of essays, ‘Ronald Reagan’, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology, attempts to account for and destroy this magic by restoring the two dimensions it has effaced: history and psychic interiority. The title ...”

“... American policy. Thomas treads familiar and on the whole uncontroversial ground: the influence of George Kennan, the warnings of Winston Churchill, the first steps toward the formation of the containment policy. But here, as elsewhere, there is a one-sided, deterministic quality to the story he tells. Western policy-makers are curiously reactive figures in ...”

“... handiwork. To that effort, this very fine book makes an important contribution. A decade ago, Michael Gordon, a reporter with the New York Times, and Bernard Trainor, a retired US Marine Corps lieutenant general, collaborated on The Generals’ War, still perhaps the best narrative history of the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91. Cobra II, a worthy ...”

“... as the police were fumbling with handcuffs. It was this spectacle – more than the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, after a violent altercation – that set off the demonstrations which continue in many American cities to protest against the mistreatment and killing of citizens with impunity. The Senate Select Committee report on CIA ...”

“... in particular the preoccupation with metaphysics which had so fascinated Coleridge, Carlyle and George Eliot. Disdaining textual positivism in all its forms, Stern taught his pupils (myself among them) and younger colleagues to treat novelists, dramatists, poets and philosophers as a simple continuum using the same currency of ideas. What rival Germanists ...”

“... her portrayal of June Buckridge in the film version of Frank Marcus’s The Killing of Sister George. Sister George was an important turning-point. Her career had brought her to the Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham, and Mother Goose, where she was upstaged each night by Frank Ifield yodelling. We should be grateful to ...”

“... an entire chapter to the ways in which the plays of the period – such as the anonymous comedy George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (c.1590), Antony Munday’s two-part Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598) and Jonson’s unfinished Sad Shepherd – remember or re-enact the paradigmatic story of Robin Hood. In ...”

“... confined to Shakespeare: among those the countess patronised were James Thomson, John Gay and George Frideric Handel (of whom she painted a portrait), all of them occasional guests at the Ashley-Cooper family seat, St Giles House, at Wimborne St Giles in Dorset.My interest was much piqued by the fact that I knew the Wimborne St Giles estate, or at least ...”