“... she could close America’s political divide’) to the Democratic nomination and then defeating John McCain in the presidential election – he felt he had proved something both about himself and his country. ‘My having been elected president was proof that the American idea endures.’ It’s a big claim. No one else, by implication, could make ...”

“... His father, Lee Kuan Yew – Singapore’s second founding father – would have agreed. When he took power at the head of the anti-colonial People’s Action Party (PAP) more than half a century ago, LKY followed the advice of his Dutch economic adviser not to remove the statue of Raffles from Singapore harbour: it would be foolish to retire such a beacon ...”

“... endowed her with an instrument that even she does not fully understand,’ and Pauline Kael took every opportunity to lionise her ‘protean, volatile talent’. At the end of her first gig in Los Angeles, at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, Tony Curtis shouted out: ‘Just start at the top and do it all over again!’ Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, Jack ...”

“... realist? His engagement with the Communist Party – he had been a leader of the Chicago John Reed Club, the CPUSA writers’ group, and published journalism in The New Masses – contributed, but Wright’s relationship with the party had always been stormy, particularly when it came to aesthetics. His 1937 manifesto, ‘Blueprint for Negro ...”

“... thought to be everywhere. This was the milieu in which Maoism in the strict sense emerged, and Xi took to it. In 1943, at Mao’s direction, he led a purge in Suide County (he was not beyond torture or execution). In the later years of the civil war, he persuaded two influential Nationalist leaders in Yulin to defect to the Communists along with their ...”

“... she had become ensnared in what she later called an ‘escape marriage’; she then divorced and took up a career in art, first in St Louis and afterwards in Chicago, where she studied at the Art Institute and frequented the circle of writers associated with Poetry magazine, the journal in which Pound published his earliest verse and most provocative ...”

“... temporary replacement, Miss Anderson, but with the wonderfully named Elspeth Champcommunal, who took over in time for the 1916 Christmas edition, informing readers that ‘the Parisienne’s day is not complete unless she wears the colour of spring.’ Champcommunal was more fashion-conscious than Todd; she knew people like Paul Poiret – the first person ...”

“... jump come the next, surely imminent election.By chance, in between visits to St Albans, business took me to other Remainian strongholds. After Bath, Edinburgh and St Albans in one week, I began to feel like a character in an implausible dystopian novel from the early 2000s. ‘It is the year 2019, and Britain is divided into two nations, Remainia and ...”

“... even briefly became an improbable object of adulation in the Sunni Arab world). But though he took pride in Hizbullah’s performance on the battlefield, he was chastened by the ferocity of Israel’s bombardment, and acknowledged that his movement’s cross-border hostage-taking operation had offered Israel a pretext to destroy large parts of Lebanon, a ...”

“... of the Past’ dwells on a moment of utter captivation experienced by the young Woolf as she took in the sweep of gardens stretching down the slope below Talland House, the family’s holiday home in St Ives. ‘The buzz, the croon, the smell, all seemed to press voluptuously against some membrane; not to burst it; but to hum round one such a complete ...”

“... proffered solutions of two apparently very different kinds. One, advanced by Lord Woolf and Sir John Laws, is based on a fresh paradigm of constitutional law – fresh at least in this country, though familiar elsewhere. It looks beyond the Diceyan datum line of a supreme and unchallengeable Parliament and asks where a Parliament derives its authority to ...”

“... his suffering by marrying the princess, he is married to a beautiful movie actress. Why, then, has John Keane chosen as the subtitle of his biography ‘A Political Tragedy in Six Acts’? In the Seventies, when Havel was still a relatively unknown Czech dissident writer, Keane played a crucial role in making him known in the West: he organised the publication ...”

“... flowers to the wire fencing around the Rose and the Globe, had a familiar whiff.Andrew Gurr and John Orrell’s Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe concerns a project conceived well before the recent discoveries. But its primary aim – to present the case for a ‘reconstruction’ of the Globe Theatre in Southwark near the site of the original – might well ...”

“... This​ book is a departure from John Carey’s normal mode, much more intently introductory than anything else he has written in a long and distinguished career. A Little History of Poetry canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission, assuming in the reader no previous acquaintance with the subject (‘Confessional poetry is poetry that reveals personal confidences, especially relating to mental illness and hospitalisation’) or indeed with other sorts of knowledge that might be thought fairly general (‘Totalitarian regimes seek to control every aspect of life, including writing ...”

“... Before​ Labour took power in July, there was a lot of talk about ‘foundations’, and it has continued since. The second chapter of the party’s election manifesto was titled ‘Strong Foundations’. On the fourth day of the new administration, Rachel Reeves gave a speech outlining the ways she planned to ‘fix the foundations of our economy ...”