“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... out: ‘Look at me! … Don’t you think I’m beautiful?’ In fact, she thought he looked like Donald Duck, and insisted he put his clothes on and take her to meet André Breton. ‘There has only been one really good edition of anything that Shakespeare wrote,’ he told the writer Ruthven Todd, ‘and that is an edition of Venus and Adonis that I did ...”

“... resistance has to do with the centrality of military strategy in contemporary policy-making. Donald Rumsfeld and others like him have apparently calculated that climate change will enhance rather than detract from the country’s long-term security. The US, with its flexible economy, temperate location, low population density and access to Canadian ...”

“... foes thou hast, one there one here,/One far one ultimately near,/Two filthy fogs blot out thy light:/The German, and the Sodomite.’ The pamphlet ran into four editions and sold thousands of copies, but although he had had the pleasure of seeing several of his enemies and old acquaintances ruined, in jail or, at the very least, visited by the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... led IS since 2010, in a US raid in north-west Syria was celebrated in a self-glorifying speech by Donald Trump as proof that IS had been definitively destroyed. The claim had some substance: al-Baghdadi, who five years earlier had declared himself caliph in the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul, was the most important surviving symbol of IS as a territorial state. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... judicial reforms invalid; the US Supreme Court was asked (but declined) to disqualify Donald Trump from standing for president; and the International Court of Justice was asked (but declined) to order Israel to suspend its military operations in Gaza. These events attest to the political vitality of law, courts and the rule of law. It is an ...”

“... was ‘not making any real effort to present the National-Socialist regime in its most favourable light’. A crude Goebbels-inspired campaign in the German press made play of the fact that the Times spelled backwards was ‘Semit’, supposedly a sign that it was a Jewish-Marxist organisation.In August that year, three German journalists were expelled from ...”