“... month. He won four elections and forged a Democratic majority that lasted into the 1960s. When he took office in March 1933 the US banking system had collapsed and a quarter of the workforce was unemployed. When he died in April 1945 Americans were enjoying unprecedented prosperity and victory in the war had catapulted the country from the margins of ...”

“... seemed to me,’ Henry James wrote to the critic and campaigner for homosexual rights John Addington Symonds in 1884, ‘that the victims of a common passion should sometimes exchange a look.’ The common passion James referred to was for Italy – or was it?Here is one double-take. In Mansfield Park, published in 1814, Mary Crawford is rattling ...”

“... proprietary rights over territories ‘lost’ by incompetent Presidents or neglectful officials. John Stempel’s book Inside the Iranian Revolution exemplifies this attitude. As Deputy Chief of the Political Section of the US Embassy, Stempel served in Tehran during the critical years from 1975 to mid-1979, after the fall of the Shah, when most of the ...”

“... on a ‘humanitarian’ mission that seemed to evaporate as Rwandese and Zairean rebel troops took it on themselves to settle the political and military legacy of the 1994 catastrophe. The details of that catastrophe were already familiar before the turmoil in Zaire and the Hutu migration back to Rwanda. The response of the international community at the ...”

“... is a passage taken at random from the report: Lejla Ibrahimovic, 1994, a Bosnian asylum-seeker, took an overdose of sleeping pills after a year-long struggle for her husband to be granted a visa to join her. The Home Office granted her husband a compassionate visa after her death to look after the couple’s two children . . . Zinaida Mitzofanova, 63, and ...”

“... than forwards to the immediate stirrings of a literary moment whose play with personae and masks took some of its cues from earlier uses of imaginary portraiture. Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is a Housmanesque figure of sorts, ‘out of key with his time’, just as Housman’s spareness and shiftingness, from poem to poem, connect him to a wider ...”

“... forgot to spend them, until the cheques grew tattered and the notes got lost; eventually his wife took over the household finances and restricted him to pocket money of 2/6 per outing. Sex was not an obvious temptation either. Despite the restrictions she put on his wallet and on his waistline, G.K. adored his sober, dutiful, unshowy Frances, and was content ...”

“... of near misses, such as when Louis, the French Dauphin, was offered the English throne after King John’s death and was cheered through the streets of London before being defeated in the Battle of Lincoln in May 1217 and then the Battle of Sandwich in August, perhaps the first ever battle fought by sailing ships in the open sea.Even the fiasco of the last ...”

“... The conquest​ of most of the North American continent by Anglophone settlers took roughly three hundred years, from the first stake at Jamestown to the last bullet at Wounded Knee. The Spanish had subdued a much vaster population of Indigenous peoples in Mexico and Peru in just under half a century and expected to repeat the formula, mobilising the Indigenous tributaries against the Indigenous core as they moved up from their outposts in Florida, only to find there was no power centre to replace ...”

“... round number pulled out of a hat. In the New York Times the PR spokesman identified himself as ‘John Barron’. In the Associated Press story the same publicity man called himself ‘Donald Baron’ and was quoted as saying that ‘the merit of these stones was not great enough to save them.’ Both ‘John’ and ...”

“... a spy, merely an unusually observant visitor who already knew what to look out for. He and Anna took a house, The Priory, well away from the diplomatic quarter in Arts and Crafts country at Hammersmith. This was where William Morris lived at Kelmscott House and where in October of that year he died. It was Morris, along with Ruskin and occasionally ...”

“... troops, clearly served Putin’s domestic purposes, giving him a patriotic ratings boost that took his approval figures from a sluggish 45 per cent in February to 66 per cent in mid-April. But it was mainly a response to the altered balance of power in Kiev. In previous years, Moscow had sought to retain an effective veto over the political set-up in ...”

“... Nobel laureates per capita than anywhere else in the world. The other winner was Arthur Lewis, who took the economics prize in 1979. Walcott won his in 1992. By happy coincidence they share a birthday and the government makes a fuss of its favoured children with a Nobel Laureate Week each January. Asked my business at the airport on my way to record with ...”

“... refers to the management of three major studios, MGM, Paramount and 20th Century-Fox. The Nazis took movies very seriously. Urwand opens his book by recounting a discussion of King Kong in 1933 by members of a committee convened to decide whether the film could be ‘expected to damage the health of normal spectators’. The expert witness from the German ...”

“... or more precisely of the difference between two moments: the summer of 1915, when the novel by John Buchan on which it’s based began to appear in serial form, in the middle of one world war; and the summer of 1935, when the odds on the imminent outbreak of another were shortening by the day. The film takes from the novel its title, the name of the ...”