“... still called the shots. Accordingly, it built links to political power. Its connections to George W. Bush have attracted much attention. They were indeed longstanding, with deep roots in Houston’s local politics, and went beyond financial contributions: in 1986, Enron was involved in joint drilling with Bush’s company, Spectrum 7. Enron’s ...”

“... preferred image of itself. The figure made its first, understated appearance in March 2010, when Andrew Haldane, the Bank’s Executive Director for Financial Stability, included it in a talk in Hong Kong, then reappeared later that year in a chart buried at the back of the December issue of the Bank’s Financial Stability Report. The figure was the size of ...”

“... The tide of modern art wasn’t long in coming: in the first Impressionist salon in 1874, George Braquemond showed an etching of Manet’s Olympia alongside an intriguing version of Rain, Steam and Speed. He captured some of the elements of Turner’s title – the wind-driven rain slashes across the bridge – but his train appears as static as a ...”

“... and his negligence as a craftsman? For Anglophone critics of Byron, led in our generation by Andrew Rutherford and Jerome McGann, reassurance comes with Don Juan. Here is a poem of the right length and range to be called major, written in a complex stanza and in a fascinating, difficult diversity of tones. For the American Hermione de Almeida, epic is a ...”

“... for a while longer, a wish shared by many ‘wise men’ of the West, from Alexandre Kojève to George Kennan, who preferred a world of bounded empires to one of nation-states. But by war’s end no one was in a position to gainsay the broad shape of the Pax Americana. Perry Anderson, in American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers, his first sustained critique ...”

“... Blair’s latest consensus hair policy, Lord Archer’s ironic, pre-penitentiary crop, the way Andrew Motion carries off his loden coat as he swirls between taxi and station platform. Julian Barnes’s novels are depilated at source, fat-free. Frisking them for a Moorcockian digression, a set of cellulite-heavy parentheses, would be like checking a tub of ...”

“... produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. And now Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal killed in Emancipation Park. It is true, as some have sanctimoniously pointed out, that even in her death, Heyer was a beneficiary of white privilege, remembered as a ‘strong woman’, rather than ...”

“... him, engravers who processed his illustrations and, to wrap things up, a ‘lost entry’ in George Eliot’s journal, recording ‘Mr Thackeray’s passing’. This last was clearly inspired by Peter Ackroyd’s imaginary conversation between Chatterton, T.S. Eliot, Dickens and Oscar Wilde in his biography of the Great Inimitable. By such ...”

“... vernacular in England, Scots Baronial was the required whimsy north of the Border, though not for Andrew Carnegie, whose massy Skibo Castle was ‘aesthetically parasitic’. At Stornoway the opium trader Sir James Matheson erected a battlemented fortalice, Lews Castle, above the harbour. ‘Thanks to the fondness of the Chinese for narcotics,’ we are ...”

“... different angles on many of the same issues and individuals. Haydon is there, at the Coronation of George IV, a figure in the crowd, describing the ‘silken roar’ as it rose. The Carlyles trail glumly through the chapter on building, hunting for a suitable house. With the exception of a disappointing essay on the theatre the accounts interconnect and ...”

“... junior, Jacob de Vos, into the leading role.De Vos’s star witness was a professor of philosophy, Andrew Murray. Murray was intended to confer an air of objectivity on the state’s case by explaining to the three judges the insurrectionary ideology lurking in the ANC’s reformist prose. He spent three catastrophic weeks under cross-examination by lawyers as ...”

“... Bill Deedes, a kindly, urbane but ineffectual man, who boasted that he never gave anyone orders. Andrew Knight, former editor of the Economist and Black’s new chief executive and plenipotentiary in London, recommended Max Hastings as Deedes’s successor. Though only 40, Hastings was already an established military historian and a reporter of formidable ...”

“... over the publication of minutes of cabinet meetings and the correspondence between Tony Blair and George W. Bush delayed things by a year. In 2014 it was agreed that a ‘small number of full extracts from the minutes of [Cabinet] meetings’ thought to be ‘most critical’ could be published. The sensitivity of the Blair/Bush correspondence – it was ...”

“... In 1729, with the immortal Newton two years dead, a London mathematics teacher and draughtsman, Andrew Motte, even managed to bring out an English translation of the whole of his greatest work. There has never, until now, been another. It has understandably taken the Harvard historian of science I. Bernard Cohen and his collaborators much longer to produce ...”

“... largely considered. Carey tells of a drunken assault on a Bob Dylan puppet belonging to the writer Andrew Sinclair and kept in his house, in a bedroom used by the Goldings. Waking in the night, Golding mistook the puppet for Satan, attacked it and buried it in the garden. There are other reports of barely credible drunken violence and insult. Sometimes it ...”