“... waterboarded, and on what was gained, would help the US electorate evaluate the promises made by Donald Trump and other Republican candidates to bring waterboarding back. Hayden’s failure even to mention these discrepancies undermines his insistence that the intelligence community can help the public make informed decisions. The different demands of the ...”

“... ostensibly looking for stories but mainly just looking’. It’s January 2017, just after Donald Trump’s election, and something’s up. She’s suspicious of Felix, her boyfriend of eighteen months: ‘Felix had revealed himself to be completely unrevealing, insisting over and over as I baited and nagged and implored him to tell me his innermost ...”

“... isn’t one. It’s not sociology masquerading as fiction, which is the way Black novels are often read. ‘I don’t like my writing when it’s polemic,’ she told an interviewer. ‘As a human I love looking at the systemic issues, but as a writer I love the teeny-tiny instances that come from big socioeconomic issues.’ She’s deft with lists, executing ...”

“... effective leader of his party and an outstanding prime minister. Having reacted against Ramsay Mac-Donald, the argument runs, Labour stood in need of a personality who would put party above self, and Attlee fitted the bill. Yet in his quiet fashion he was skilful in managing the Party and holding it together. Hence Labour’s victory in the General Election of ...”

“... grown-up woman, over 20, asserting that the excellence of Psmith proves that she is not too old to read the Captain. There is an article by an idealistic boy, called ‘The Aim of Socialism’, which begins: ‘Although Mr Wodehouse’s description of Socialism is justified by the excellent use he makes of it, I fear that it will only increase the delusion ...”

“... amongst the crème de la crème of their generation’. (We are duly irritated, but of course we read on.) The three women are Cambridge-educated, professionally active, and in their mid-forties. One is single, one is happily married, and one is on the threshold of marital breakdown at the time when the novel opens. It is the evening of 31 December 1979, and ...”

“... the question: ‘Can machines think?’ I heard more about the importance of Bletchley from Donald Michie, Professor of Robotology at Edinburgh University. Three years later I read Angus Calder’s The People’s War, a social history of World War Two, and resolved to write something one day about the war. I come from ...”

“... an underlying story, they have no narrative as such and work as separate units. At worst, they read like a cross between R.D. Laing’s case-notes and Richard Aldington’s Imagism. At best, they have a force and integrity which none of the other poets associated with the Review, and few poets since, have come close to matching. The problem, as Hamilton ...”

“... fury of New Apocalypse. As for the Movement, two of its original New Lines members, Thom Gunn and Donald Davie, went off in directions undreamed of by Robert Conquest and still largely ignored by contemporary British poetry. Looking a little further, we find that Gunn and Davie between them do something that has still not been taken on board in Britain: they ...”

“... seventy-five years. How did it happen? On that question, Lubenow is wisely silent. He quotes Sir Donald MacAlister’s claim that ‘the voice that issues from the hearth-rug on Saturday night has gone through all the earth, its sound to the world’s end. It speaks in Senates though men know it not, it controls principalities and powers, it moulds ...”

“... Raiding, they said, was the bedouin national sport, like league football or county cricket.’ (Donald Rumsfeld appears to have taken a similarly sporting attitude to recent looting in Baghdad, although his tolerance would presumably not encompass looting by the poor of presidential palaces and museums in, say, Washington DC.) The British as occupying power ...”

“... than the outer one – the second is the one to be found ‘crying in a cocktail glass’, as we read in The Age of Anxiety – and the inner one had a field day when Auden was being rewarded for something. Although he was happy and flattered to return to Oxford to become Professor of Poetry, he had, at the same time, what he called ‘a very unpleasant ...”

“... had presided over uninterrupted economic growth, but it was weakened after its popular leader, Donald Tusk, left to take up the presidency of the European Council. (Tusk, a political alpha male, had made sure he had no prominent rivals or plausible successors.) Worse, the party was caught up in what came to be known as Waitergate. Illegal recordings from a ...”

“... devil bound them. Protestant missionaries, meanwhile, had to teach indigenous people to speak and read English, and even then couldn’t be sure that they had understood the gospels correctly.Catholic conquerors in the Americas certainly did win allegiance from tribes and nations by exploiting the potential for religious syncretism. Wooden monuments ...”

“... servant in the Department of the Environment and had met his mother, a part-time typist, there. Donald Parr was a Yorkshireman, the son of a Methodist preacher. His wife, Joyce, whom Parr describes as ‘very bright’, was brought up an only child in Gloucestershire, the daughter of ‘a real Cheltenham lady’. ‘They were very different people, my ...”