“... on the Soviet Union’.* In 2009 the Ministry of Defence commissioned Lieutenant General Chris Brown to carry out a review of British strategy, later released under the Freedom of Information Act as the ‘Operation Telic Lessons Compendium’. Brown concluded that the army hadn’t been prepared for the occupation, and ...”

“... sounded over the grumble of jammed traffic. With a final, ironic caress from the fingertips, a brown hand despatched a metal globe. It landed, hopped to reveal a small moon-crater, and curved slowly in a scatter of hard dust. The thrower remained a stylish, temporary statue: knees not quite unbent, and the right hand ecstatically spread. I noted a furled ...”

“... a cleaning lady called Mrs Bacon, a News of the World reader who gossiped about suicide and ‘cut brown bread so thinly that its fibres had to be bonded by slabs of butter’. In the school holidays he was sent to stay with various uncles and aunts (‘Uncle Hank and Uncle Wangle … Uncle Cecil, pharmacist. Wife: Auntie Rae. Uncle Edgar, dislikable ...”

“... England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term ...”

“... Voted off the NEC in 1993, he could only watch as first John Smith and then Blair and Gordon Brown modernised the Party. That they did so from Millbank Tower, built on the site of the house in which Benn was born, added pathos to the triumph of New Labour over old. The fate of the Bennite Left under New Labour underlines the point: stalwarts from the ...”

“... littering the sofa tables of the Manchester bourgeosie. In the 1980s, the American poet David Antin charged that ‘anthologies are to poets as the zoo is to animals.’ More recently, Marjorie Perloff called for undergraduates to swear off Evian, in the hope that tap-water drinkers could afford unabridged books rather than hackneyed ...”

“... aunt. The most important effect was to create a very close bond between Christina and her father, David; but then David Stead remarried. There was a stepmother, and soon a brood of half-brothers and sisters, which grew to number five. Christina felt the gap open between her and the man who had been mother and father; and at ...”

“... its multiracial character: a chapter of history of which all Britons can be proud. As Christopher Brown’s excellent recent book on the abolition movement suggests, Britain, the world’s leading slave trader in the 18th century, later presented abolition as irrefutable proof of its virtuous motives as it embarked on a new era of ...”

“... in triumph like the train-ferry when it puts in’; blue wind-flowers that ‘shoot up out of the brown rustle of last year in overlooked places where one’s gaze never pauses’; or ‘It’s spring 1827. Beethoven/hoists his death mask and sails off.’ Unusually, and attractively too, his poems don’t eclipse or exhaust their subjects, but leave ...”

“... mostly about America, Kinney is at her best when writing about America, though she is good too on David Cameron’s 2006 ‘hug a hoodie’ speech. She describes it as ‘clumsy’, but approves of one part, which she describes, in a telling phrase, as ‘haunting’. ‘For young people, hoodies are often more defensive than offensive,’ Cameron ...”

“... herself in her art. (Male painters might project aspects of themselves onto their depictions of David, but couldn’t do the same with their Judiths and Lucretias.) In her allegorical works, Artemisia brought artist and subject together by reifying the female personifications used in academic painting to represent abstract qualities and ideals. With superb ...”

“... moment of maturity never arrives; success does instead. By the age of 34, Levy has talked David Remnick into hiring her as a staff writer at the New Yorker, and after that there is, as her dad rather ominously puts it, ‘Nowhere to go but down.’ When she and Lucy decide to have a baby – Levy, never one to miss out on an adventure, does the ...”

“... is a Shetland name, now universally adopted. It suggests something of their tundra-brown weightiness, their gimlet eye. To eat, they harass other birds while they’re flying, especially gannets, until the victim is so stressed it sicks up its dinner, which the bonxie swipes. They nest on open ground; stray too close, and the bonxie will drive ...”

“... in Ben Schreckinger’s The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power (Little, Brown, £25) are to do with Trump and his coterie of goons rather than the Bidens themselves. The contrast is between shameless fraud and sadism on the one hand, and shamefaced venality and bumbling on the other. When the contents of a laptop allegedly belonging ...”

“... Rainbow, Salisbury Cathedral’ from ‘Various Subjects of Landscape’ after John Constable by David Lucas (1837) The uses of adversity are sweet as well as bitter, as the old Duke in Shakespeare almost said, and what is best about Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape is probably as much a result of hard times as what is not so ...”