“... the dining room: Confidential Chats with Boys (1911) by the American physician and sex-pamphleteer William Lee Howard. Dr Howard urged teenage boys to ‘sleep on the floor, anywhere: go without sleeping’ rather than share a bed with another boy or a man. And if it couldn’t be avoided, ‘keep awake with your eyes on something you can hit him with. At the ...”

“... manage the unconscious impulses of Organisation Man, that time-serving drone who – discovered by William Whyte in the Fifties – came fully fitted with the miserable wife, brattish children and off-the-peg infidelities of a Joseph Heller novel that was yet to be written. The creed of excellence has a sun-bleached Californian feel, but it is also tuned into ...”

“... even though she reported, in the Eighties, with evident sympathy on the Greenham Common camp and the wives of ‘the enemy within’ during the miners’ strike. ‘I am a suffragette,’ she wrote in 1962 – on which she would expand, cautiously, by talking about her mother’s involvement in the American campaign for the women’s vote and her ...”

“... already felt in Europe and Eurasia. There’s a story, maybe a fable, about a Displaced Persons camp somewhere in Germany at the end of the war. Red Cross and UNRRA ladies are interviewing survivors from the concentration camps. ‘Well, Mr Lemberger, and where would you like to go now?’ ‘New Zealand.’ ‘New Zealand? But that’s awfully far ...”

“... and about the Bush-era corruption that turned the Minerals Management Service into a crony-ridden camp that didn’t do its job, and about Big Oil, and about a host of other things. But it is also about the destruction we’ve all seen in the images, which are horrible in a deep and primordial way. I went out on boats twice and saw an oiled pelican through ...”

“... to destabilise Syria and that these efforts continued into the Obama years. In December 2006, William Roebuck, then in charge of the US embassy in Damascus, filed an analysis of the ‘vulnerabilities’ of the Assad government and listed methods ‘that will improve the likelihood’ of opportunities for destabilisation. He recommended that Washington ...”

“... briefly on 18 June, but not seconded; several of his powerful friends, including Marvell and Sir William Davenant, whom Milton had saved from execution as a Royalist conspirator under the Commonwealth, helped to rescue him. The recollection of images from Macbeth might also contain a trace of subconscious regicide guilt. Milton may have had the regicide ...”

“... who rose to become an alderman of Stratford-upon-Avon. Both fathers were socially ambitious: William Middleton bought himself a coat of arms from the College of Heralds in 1568, thereby securing the all-important right for himself and his successors to style themselves ‘gentleman’ – a feat that John Shakespeare, with the help of his successful ...”

“... the essay it is not difficult to discern that Browning’s own heart really lies with the opposite camp. So it does not come as a surprise to hear him announce at the essay’s crescendo: ‘If the subjective might seem to be the ultimate requirement of every age, the objective, in the strictest state, must still retain its original value.’ This is ...”

“... from Bernie Sanders that question wouldn’t be surprising. But it was more remarkable to hear William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, describe American business as ‘part of the problem’ because its corporate leaders are too focused on their stock options and have lost sight of the ‘national view’ and the need to ensure that ‘that the next ...”

“... been local. They ‘would have known … this is King Park, this is a known area for homeless to camp out, folks with mental disabilities in here – tread carefully, de-escalate.’ The visiting police wouldn’t know King Park from Central Park.‘Make America Safe Once Again’ was in full swing at the convention. Nobody mentioned guns or police ...”

“... to liberation, involving risk, experiment and the courage to fail. In the early 1970s she set up camp in Saint-Denis at the margins of the capital and the banlieues, at ease in a département that had been run by the Communist Party since Liberation in 1944. She had plans to document the neighbourhood, with its mainly working-class residents – many of ...”

“... jealous of her. When she was fifteen months old her father, Emanuel, died of a seizure at a summer camp in the Catskills, and Streisand, her mother and nine-year-old brother moved first to her maternal grandparents’ house in Bed-Stuy and later to a housing project in Flatbush with Diana’s second husband, Lou Kind.The loss of her father and the experience ...”

“... Also cited in the FHA investigation was Fred Trump’s partner, contractor and financier William ‘Willie’ Tomasello, who according to the federal Organised Crime Task Force was associated with elements of both the Gambino and Genovese families.Fred Trump appeared to be grooming Fred Jr to take over his business. But he was a harsh and exigent ...”

“... eluding any certifiable definition by journalists, historians, scholars, aid and lending experts, camp followers, demographers, catastrophists and optimists, or by individuals of very different persuasions who happen to inhabit it. In a long moment of desperation, Davidson’s remains the least peremptory evaluation on offer – and by far the most ...”