“... 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 ...”

“... Act 2003, which introduced the Building (Scotland) Regulations 2004, which came into force on 1 May 2005. These contain a mandatory regulation: ‘Every building must be designed and constructed in such a way that in the event of an outbreak of fire within the building, or from an external source, the spread of fire on the external walls of the building is ...”

“... her hands as she tries to enter into a conversation among Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Theresa May and Christine Lagarde, who grimaces. It is reported that a ‘friendship tree’, given months earlier by Macron to Trump and ceremoniously planted by both on the White House lawn as a symbol of the ties that bind France and the US, immediately died.*Before ...”

“... Francine du Plessix Gray – ‘Francine Duplicitous Gray’, as Roth called her. Interviewing may not have been Miller’s forte but what was his forte? He made such a skimpy mess of the Notes on the Text for Volume Three of Roth’s Library of America edition that Roth went apoplectic in a barrage of faxes that must have had little lightning bolts ...”

“... of British agriculture today. The worst has not been and gone. It is yet to come. Still, one thing may already be clear: British farming hanged itself on the expectation of plenty.One day not long ago I was in the Sainsbury’s superstore on the Cromwell Road. Three of the company’s top brass ushered me down the aisles, pointing here, gasping there, each of ...”

“... rich, and spend the revenue for the common good. But as Hobsbawm tells us, while the noble bandit may be generous and chivalrous, he’s a lousy socialist: Insofar as bandits have a ‘programme’, it is the defence or restoration of the traditional order of things ‘as it should be’ (which in traditional societies means as it is believed to have been in ...”

“... highlands – his kingdom had withstood Europeans before. With Napoleon threatening Europe, Robert Brownrigg, the British governor at Colombo, was instructed not to drain the treasury with an unnecessary adventure. But he was ambitious for rank and title, and so found an excuse: King Vikrama, he claimed, had committed acts of barbarism against local ...”

“... short of this last reservation, but the Sustainable Development Commission insists that markets may look very different in future and we shouldn’t assume that our strong ‘financial and service sectors’ will enable us to access food from around the world indefinitely. Better to arrest the decline of British farming: the carnival of food awareness in ...”

“... us than that of diversitvy, which epitomises for us a long past of misfortune and abjection?’ It may be less the fact than the cult of regional diversity that tells us something Specific about the history of France.There is a second claim for French specificity in Braudel’s account, less prominent or pursued, but comparable in kind. Turning from geography ...”

“... of $445 billion.Zuckerberg’s news about Facebook’s size came with an announcement which may or may not prove to be significant. He said that the company was changing its ‘mission statement’, its version of the canting pieties beloved of corporate America. Facebook’s mission used to be ‘making the world ...”