“... The Founding Fathers of the United States were mainly Southerners: between them, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison can take credit for drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, winning the Revolutionary War, and preserving America’s independence through its turbulent early decades ...”

“... bright, confident style, Coward irresistibly combined reserve and high camp. He became the merry-andrew of moderation, warning mothers to keep their daughters off the stage, confiding, in Present Laughter (1942), that sex was ‘vastly overrated’ and wickedly pleading: ‘don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans.’ Coward was a performer who wrote: not a ...”

“... in one or more demonstrations in the theatre at Dumfries in favour of the French and against King George – must be substantially true or Burns would not have had so much trouble apologising for it to his seniors in the Excise. While not taking Burns’s politics seriously, McIntyre judges them on grids provided by notional two-party ...”

“... been less impressed. For David Daiches, Wilson is an ‘absolute impostor’ and a ‘windbag’; Andrew Noble tags him ‘the clay-footed prophet of the British-Scots middle-class’. In some respects, Wilson deserves all he gets. As an academic he was a charlatan; as a critic a coward and a bully. He was a forgettable poet and a bad novelist. On the other ...”

“... Syria, the only way that the civil war will end … is … a government without Bashar Assad.’ George W. Bush: ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.’) To judge by their previous careers, neither Bolton nor Pompeo shares Trump’s conceit that he can destroy the Iranian regime by a method short of war; on the other hand, Trump may ...”

“... the fight against the insurgents in most of the country by the end of 2005. I heard General George Casey, commander of the Multinational Forces in Iraq, say: ‘We should be able to take some fairly substantial reductions in the size of our forces.’ I heard that the insurgents had been driven out of the cities and into the desert and that they were ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”