“... I n​ the days leading up to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in February, the prediction market Kalshi set up a trade, a wager in all but name, on the Yes/No proposition that the disgraced Republican ex-congressman George Santos would attend. The larger the number of people who bet ‘Yes’ (or, in the language the prediction markets prefer, bought ‘Yes’ contracts), the more the value of the bet would rise; if they bet ‘No’, it would fall ...”

“... dangerous sentence let fall by another of Browning’s characters, Mr Sludge: ’Really I want to light up my own mind.’ The equivocal qualms with which we listen to Blougram and Sludge suggest something of Browning’s odd and striking position as a writer. Post-Romantic art created for itself a ‘Palace of Art’ as refuge from the philistinism of an ...”

“... are often more theatrical than his plays; they are energised by conflict, by movement, by shifting light, by the power that came from action and unrest, such as the images invoked in ‘Easter 1916’:birds that rangeFrom cloud to tumbling cloud,Minute by minute they change;A shadow of cloud on the streamChanges minute by minute.Part of the poems’ drama came ...”

“... either end of an increasingly blurred spectrum. The lengthy reports gathered in The Moon by Whale Light (‘and Other Adventures among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians and Whales’) were written for the New Yorker, on which Ackerman has served as a staff writer on animal life. The very niche is new, and nature-writers today have a glamour quite foreign to their ...”

“... Enright’s volume contained work by eight poets: Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain, to which list Conquest’s volume added the name of Thom Gunn. Insofar as there has ever been agreement on the matter, the Movement has been taken to consist of these nine writers. They ...”

“... herself defending unauthorised migrants, but who can’t be doing with the banks or migrants; Donald Trump, with his joint honours in bankruptcy and locker room studies, who can’t be doing with multiculturalism or the virtues of old-fashioned public service.Everything about Macron suggests a personality rather than a programme, but if so, it is Macron ...”

“... how they huffed and puffed and told him to go back home!) resounded with his intellectual kind. Donald Mitchell recalled the startling impact of one of Keller’s early reviews: ‘I was knocked out by it, by its precision, its confidence … Gone were all those boring generalities and tedious descriptions … and in their place, detailed observations on ...”

“... Late at night, or the strangling of a river To give shape to its fall. There is no candle here to light us to bed: ‘Ode to a Poetess’ the poem is called, an expansive title by McGuckian standards, but not very illuminating. The two sentences above work by the same principle, an initial ‘subject’ producing a double set of explanatory analogies. But ...”

“... husband and wife leadership team, Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, launched Operation Eternal Light. After Saddam’s failure to topple the regime in Iran, this was intended to be the big push that would finally win control of the country. Success, Rajavi told his fighters, was inevitable because the Iranian people, both civilians and military, would ...”

“... dancing into the room. Irrationality is predictable, maybe, but not to the point of putting Donald Trump in the White House. The myopia of the nudgers is in their assumption that irrationality is a ‘behaviour’ like any other, which can be tracked and controlled – that is, rationalised. It’s true that the relation between rationality and ...”

“... family, and as a divorcé … he was holding tight to that role. That night he wore slacks and a light-blue dress shirt, open at the collar, with French cuffs, and elegant cufflinks. When I noticed that Epstein called the prince ‘Andy’, I began to call him that too.As we chatted in Maxwell’s entryway, I suddenly thought of something: my mom would never ...”

“... Grammar School, Rada and an acting job with a touring Shakespeare company in Ireland, a job with Donald Wolfit, a few years in rep, attention as a playwright for The Room (1957), and The Birthday Party (1958), sudden and extravagant fame for The Caretaker (1960). Pinter married the actress Vivien Merchant in 1956; they had a son, Daniel, in 1958. Pinter ...”

“... readiness to surrender liberty and believe the absurd. The enduring interest of this period is the light it throws, or fails to throw, on the matter of American insecurity. Whittaker Chambers is the essential symptomatic miniature here. And, when we consider how he unwittingly saved Saul Bellow for American letters, we are guided in the right direction. Much ...”

“... When Donald Rumsfeld designated the imprisoned Taliban fighters ‘unlawful combatants’ (as opposed to ‘regular’ prisoners of war), he did not simply mean that their criminal terrorist activity placed them outside the law: when an American citizen commits a crime, even one as serious as murder, he remains a ‘lawful criminal ...”

“... radio producer, who in the early 1950s was overseeing a weekly factual series for the BBC Light Programme. It occurred to him to try to transfer the populist documentary style to the new medium. In 1952 he made contact with another producer looking for a TV project, Andrew Miller Jones. Miller Jones was an ex-Army officer with a yellow ...”