“... no more real . . .’ ends with the lyrical iambic pentameter, ‘I feel the glass collide with light and day’), but it is impossible to judge what effect was intended. Dylan Thomas may have been happy to intone the poems at his reading (they are remarkably sonorous), but their difficulty prompted unenthusiastic reviews, including Hugh MacDiarmid’s ...”

“... are hymns and psalm paraphrases as well as jokey university elegies, grand pastoral effusions, light-fingered Italian sonnets (delightfully translated for the Oxford edition by Andrew McNeillie), Ovidian neo-Latin elegies, two of the best answer poems in English (‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’), a masque and two of the best neo-Latin elegies ever ...”

“... in Iraq. Nor were the mental blinkers restricted to the field operatives. On 10 September 2001, Donald Rumsfeld announced to a Pentagon audience: ‘Today we declare war on bureaucracy.’ This ‘war on bureaucracy’, inspired in part by Friedman, meant that virtually no effort was made to rebuild the shattered administrative and regulatory machinery in ...”

“... a press conference and announced that they would be suing the agency. Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, was alerted to the danger by his deputy, Dick Cheney. The Olsons received a settlement of $750,000 in exchange for dropping their legal action, and were invited to the White House, where Ford made them a public apology.As the Rockefeller report ...”

“... for the New Yorker in which she somewhat mournfully observed that, following the election of Donald Trump, ‘the personal-essay boom is over’: ‘Individual perspectives do not, at the moment, seem like a trustworthy way to get to the bottom of a subject.’ She sticks her Facebook profile into the book anyway, though regular readers of her work will ...”

“... features Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan, Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. The idea that US supremacy is seen as being ordained by divine providence is underlined by an episode showing American presidents speaking the words ‘So help me God’ when reciting the Oath of Office, immediately followed by an account of the ...”

“... in which Wittgenstein commented on the first draft of the first translation, had not yet come to light (it was published only in 1973), so there was little appreciation at the time of Wittgenstein’s own input, however questionable, into Ogden and Ramsey’s text. After the correspondence emerged, Pears and McGuinness published a revised version of their ...”

“... area of Hamburg in the early 1960s was a humid mixture of postwar German efficiency and red-light anything goes. Contracted to play all night and half of the day, the Beatles couldn’t help but become more professional, even if their onstage demeanour remained spotty and unpredictable. Hamburg was both art school and chitlin circuit in one riotously ...”

“... which happened either just before or just after the crash, and which would never have come to light had it not been for the financial crisis and the resulting surge in attention – mainly legislative attention – to the murkier deeds of the banks. The simplest of these stories concerns HBOS. This is another familiar narrative in that it involves a ...”

“... no reason: yet is always correct and just in his remarks. He is low in stature – long visage – light hair – coarse features – ungaitly – awkward – is a fiddler – loves ale – likes the girls– somewhat idle, – hates work. As Bate says, this is condescending, but it also shows ‘terrific enthusiasm’. The last sentence of Drury’s ...”

“... deadly to the book (‘Only Saul Bellow and [James] Baldwin are shown in any kind of unattractive light and then with care and preparation of context in order to strike no undue foul blow’), sapping its force, piddling away its momentum. Making It may have been intended as a tell-all, but what it delivered was a tepid modified limited hangout, to borrow a ...”

“... stages of a child’s growth – all is unexpected. But there is also that strange distance, the light veil of alienation thrown over everything.And then there is the same light veil thrown over everything when I go back to Britain. When I was first living in the States, I was eager to keep up with life ‘back at ...”

“... and (still awaiting completion) services.Today the union that Thatcher did so much to shape is light on social justice, tough on treasury borrowing, fixated by opening up markets to competition. If it weren’t for the electorate’s concerns over immigration, the Tory Brexiteers would look as though they were stuck in a time warp. After all, the EU long ...”

“... stated as heard in the present, already over. Knowlson, who quotes this passage from a letter to Donald Mc Whinnie, draws no lesson from it, other than the somewhat limp, and question-begging, suggestion that the world of How It Is is ‘related sometimes closely but rarely unambiguously to Beckett’s own life’. Certainly all possibility of a lesson ...”

“... provoked howls of indignation from SPD members. But though Schröder may have given it the green light, the decisive push for Agenda 2010, as Anke Hassel and Christof Schiller showed in Der Fall Hartz IV (2010), came from local government and the insurance and labour market agencies struggling to cope with crisis levels of unemployment. The Kohl government ...”