“... high-level ‘regime change’, as the MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec put it, by replacing the class of people who have long managed American institutions. Posobiec is something like an unofficial press secretary for the administration. When I saw him over the inauguration weekend, he told me that ‘you can’t define victory until the last day of ...”

“... good command of English; experienced in kindergarten and domestic work, plain cooking, first-class references – Write to Lisel Braun, Arenbergring 10, Vienna III.’23 May 1938: ‘Housekeeper or Companion-Help. Austrian lady, age 40, good birth and education, seeks post: good cook, needlewoman, fluent English, French; pianist; willing to care for ...”

“... were, and how they all became later: bland. McCullin’s harrowing, challenging pictures of war – Biafra, Vietnam, Bangladesh – were considered the property of news pages and bad for advertisers, yet he would work only for the Magazine and its Art Editor, Michael Rand. Wyndham believed, on the contrary, that people liked reading about ...”

“... explanation for his becoming a Marxist, while perhaps acceptable at the height of the Cold War, may by now seem somewhat physiologically reductive, and alternative explanations are possible for his shift – or rather return – to the left. He had after all worked for the ILP before the war, and as Gish notes, the ...”

“... the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror while Scott was wrestling with Home Rule for Ireland and the Boer War. Later, as Lords Northcliffe and Rothermere, their proprietorial arrogance and political manoeuvring became a legend. As Scott approached retirement, Lord Beaverbrook was making the Daily Express ‘a paper of prejudice, not thought’. And the Berry ...”

“... go together we can see if we look at Milton, yet Milton, too, had no love of the middle class and despised its notions of propriety and decoration. Milton saved up his monarchism for heaven, and defended chopping the head off the living and inadequate King, but he had a baroque eye for the grandeur usually associated, if not with courts, then with ...”

“... The trial took place in a blaze of publicity. When Annie eloquently defended the right of working-class people to sexual knowledge, a taboo was broken. For the first time a woman had publicly advocated birth control. At the end, the defendants were lucky to escape prison on a technicality. Annie’s friends had been right to fear its effects on her ...”

“... up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey.’ And in the 20th century, especially since the Second World War, a number of distinguished literary scholars have devoted years to studying and generally celebrating Pope. With the publication of a collection of essays on Pope and a new edition of the poems, Pat Rogers might appear to be laying claim not only to a place ...”

“... the other ethnic groups in apparent harmony. It is a small stratum, which also includes higher-class Chhetris and some Shreshta Newars and Thakuris, of whom he is writing. The way children are brought up within such ‘Bahun’ households contributes to the fatalistic and hierarchical attitudes. There is very little discipline; long breast-feeding on ...”

“... in Bringing Up Baby, a leopard-skin dressing-gown in My Favourite Wife, full drag in I Was a Male War Bride. The more renownedly well-fitting his own clothes were, the funnier he was in someone else’s. In the Hitchcock film, the suit marks a turning-point: having been kidnapped, Grant (Roger Thornhill) is taken to a country house and interrogated by James ...”

“... in 1948 to read medicine. In due course he switched to literature and graduated with a second-class degree. Achebe is not exactly self-effacing but his demeanour makes him seem so; a soft-spoken man, modest to a fault, gently pushing a liberal humanist agenda. When I met him in 1962 at a conference of African writers I wrote in the Guardian that he looked ...”

“... Howard and Gore had flown eastward from Rome on Singapore Airlines, at what seemed a bargain first-class rate, around the world.’ (That ‘seemed’ sounds suspicious. Did Howard and Gore mistakenly pay full fare?) Kaplan also keeps tabs on Vidal’s ground transport. ‘From Gulfport he took the bus back to New Orleans, from which at the end of February he ...”

“... as Paul Muldoon) of uncomfortable sectarian truths. But McGuckian is like Denton Welch, whose war-diaries make no mention of the war: we can only just make out this century, let alone her own particular time and place. In a recent Muldoon poem which turns his fellow Northern poets into selections from the cheese-board ...”

“... by President Reagan and by Mrs Kirkpatrick at the UN, with an acute consequent increase in Cold War tensions – was propagated despite the existence of firm intelligence evidence that it was untrue. This is, in several ways, a rather curious emphasis. It is, for a start, hardly news: as I pointed out in my own book, the fact that the Reagan Administration ...”

“... and Old Catholic. The Old Catholics are pretty well spread about the world. During the last war they were helpful to Anglicans in Java and even in Nazi Germany: their Dutch and Swiss congregations support an Anglican diocese in South Africa. They have been in full communion with the Church of England for 50 years, and Gordon Huelin’s collection of ...”