“... choking alone. The reader’s urge to rerun the story in order to repair the intolerable injustice may be embarrassing and damaging too.Racing ahead of other threats – including syphilis, the mercury that Keats had prescribed himself to treat the syphilis, and the extreme anxiety caused by the mercury – tuberculosis was destroying Keats. His doctors (some ...”

“... This is a country where convicted murderers, even multiple murderers like Barend Strydom and Robert McBride, are released within a year or two to walk the streets and give TV interviews justifying their savagery. Strydom, who gunned down 11 hapless black passers-by because he didn’t like blacks, advises us that he dislikes English-speakers just as much ...”

“... was reading an essay by Joseph Lee in a book called The Irish Parliamentary Tradition. (This title may seem like an elaborate oxymoron, but it was the sort of book published at that time.) The essay was about 1782 and Grattan’s Parliament, an important moment in Irish history, according to our school books. Parnell, Roy Foster points out in an essay in Paddy ...”

“... that is wrong with his music.’ ‘To show mastery is to be as clear and short as possible (which may be long).’ It is good to learn from the editor’s Introduction that ‘the papers in the estate contain a large number of delightfully focused aphorisms’, since this is clearly what Keller did best. Behind the specific topics – binding them together on ...”

“... CIA in formulating its assessments on Iran. But his re-defection to Iran in 2010 suggests that he may have been a double agent, calling into question all his reporting to the CIA, before and after his defection. Operation Merlin, in which the CIA attempted to pass on to Iran flawed designs for a nuclear weapon, further undermines the CIA’s credibility as a ...”

“... uninhibited generals and proconsuls, there was also a tradition of cynical candour, beginning with Robert Clive himself. His barefaced defence to the House of Commons select committee inquiring into the Company’s practices – ‘My God, Mr Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation’ – set a high benchmark. But the villainous ...”

“... path to early success, particularly her mentor, Ted Morrison, who got her invited to dinner with Robert Frost (Rich charmed him) and who groomed her for the Yale Younger Poets competition judged by Auden, which she won in 1950. The prize put her on the map. A Change of World, published the following year, garnered respectful reviews; she shone at public ...”

“... grandmother, now had the time and energy and position to put it about that she was descended from Robert E. Lee. She became, like Hughdie, an Episcopalian. Jackie and her sister Lee had two mansions in which to cavort during their teenage years. Their status, however, was precarious. In the summer at Newport, for example, only Hughdie’s real offspring had ...”

“... that she was resting and practising her elocution with a view to a theatrical career. There may also have been a miscarriage or an abortion. With no private income, Lopokova had to keep on dancing for her supper or look to men for security. Lovers were played off against one another. She dumped her nice American fiancé, the journalist Heywood Broun, in ...”

“... Trump replied. “It’s all bullshit.”’ Woodward is repeating himself here, which means he may have got his notes muddled up. What’s more likely is that everyone was just saying the same thing over and over again. Trump wanted to bring the money home, especially from South Korea. In desperation, Cohn asked him emolliently: ‘So, Mr President, what ...”

“... the bonnet badge of a Morris Minor, in the middle of a roundabout on Garsington Road. It fulfils Robert Musil’s dictum that public monuments are ‘impregnated with something that repels attention, causing the eye to roll off like drops of water off an oilcloth’. It took me almost thirty years to notice it, and even then it was because I was thinking ...”

“... party had failed him; his grandmother died; the Cross-Bronx Expressway, built by the city planner Robert Moses, ripped through East Tremont, displacing five thousand people. In 1950, Bookchin joined a literary collective led by Josef Weber, a Holocaust survivor, who had brought together a group of former Communists to publish Contemporary Issues, a journal ...”

“... minutes to Olympic glory, a corkscrew clock tower (with broken clock), a steam engine called ‘Robert’ (home to dozens of incontinent pigeons). Beggars, junk-dealers and God-ranters have been expelled from more salubrious districts. Across the road is a labyrinthine mall-tunnel of Poundland bargains, sachets of Calf’s Pizzle at £1.99 a hit. And an ...”

“... for Night Train in 1997 and has stayed there since. Night Train has a female narrator, though that may not have been enough to reverse the gender imbalance in Amis’s readership. In interviews promoting The Pregnant Widow (2010) he went so far as to describe himself as a ‘gynocrat’, someone who would welcome the rule of women. This apparent submission ...”

“... over Maastricht without ever recovering politically, Major finally got ratification through in May 1993, a couple of days after the Danes were forced into holding a second referendum. At the Treasury, Kenneth Clarke presided over a return to growth, but it was of no electoral avail. The Conservatives were comprehensively thrashed in the elections of ...”