“... he does not call these pieces poems.’ From the heart of the London literary establishment Sir John Squire described The Waste Land as a poem for which ‘a grunt would serve equally well.’ Eliot’s 1925 collection, which included ‘Gerontion’, seemed to Squire ‘obscure so inconsequent . . . Why on earth he bothers to write at all is difficult to ...”

“... eating. A number of summers ago my friend Eli and I had dinner at a trendy downtown pizza place (John F. Kennedy Jr was at the next table). After we’d finished, and I was halfway out the door, Eli called me back, in a strangely delighted tone of voice, to show me the dead, foot-long sewer rat (grey, oily belly distended, chest flattened, long yellow ...”

“... were the conspicuous themes. In the debates of that Parliament, opposition to the Major-Generals took long to surface and, when it came, was almost exclusively targeted at the Decimation. The evidence of the Parliament’s proceedings is not conclusive. There are hints that MPs’ fear of yet another military coup, and their realisation that the civilian ...”

“... foreign. The bombing of four Canadians made them aware of errors in targeting, while the trial of John Walker, a white American Muslim, for taking up arms against the United States, highlighted the significance of the confusion. Walker’s defence was that he had joined a Taliban-led jihad against ‘un-Islamic factions’ inside Afghanistan before the events ...”

“... what in the 1930s the American historian Herbert Bolton called ‘the epic of Greater America’. John Elliott’s long awaited book is just that. It not only fills an obvious gap – more like a chasm – but sets the pattern for a whole new historiography of the European colonial empires. As with all Elliott’s books, the architecture and the scope are ...”

“... engineers – under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances are compelled to act like heroes. John le Carré once called him ‘the source on which we all draw’. Alan Furst has been drawing on him for nearly twenty years: ‘The first paragraph of Kingdom of Shadows is a direct citation of Eric Ambler,’ he told an interviewer when that novel came out ...”

“... being female is dispelled when you consider his book’s rugged hero, a McNabian squarehead called John Porter, former SAS man and now broken-backed vodka-guzzler under the arches of Vauxhall. All these men have a chance to thwart the Ruperts by fixing – via immense personal courage and a lot of guns and knives – the unfixable, getting in and out of ...”

“... description of a visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1970 when he walked down John Russell Pope’s majestic central hall, the last great classical building in the Western world, with the galleries on either side ‘crammed full of people who stood up and roared at me, waving their hands and stretching them out towards me’. He was ...”

“... republic can get fucked,’ one woman screamed in front of the Hôtel de Ville, where executions took place at the height of the Terror. ‘I shit on the nation!’ But diaries and memoirs from these years illustrate the exhilaration felt in all social groups at the unfolding spectacle. Those who lived through the revolution, whether as friend or foe, knew ...”

“... hell itself, filled with writhing beasts that rend at one another as fires destroy the earth. In John Martin’s The Country of The Iguanodon (1837), a group of dragon-like reptiles slither and bite; in A. Demarly’s apocalyptic Eruptions of Poisonous Hot Springs in the Triassic Period (1883) a geyser of toxic gas spurts from a volcanic vent, while dead ...”

“... in 1791, allowing US citizens access to arms, was manageable when most firearms were muskets that took minutes to load. Obviously, this is no longer the case. So while it may be tempting to attribute current political dysfunction in the US to particular personalities, some of the root causes are long-term, structural and connected to America’s experience of ...”

“... a number of illustrious admirers – including those poetic polar opposites, Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery – his poetry is still not widely known. ‘Soldiers Bathing’, it’s true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both Hill and Ashbery have explored Prince’s ...”

“... breakthroughs ‘followed by complete democratic breakdowns or coups d’état’. Democratisation took a more sedate course in Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, where – despite some resistance and occasional hazards – there was steady incremental progress towards settled democracy. Old conservative elites, Ziblatt ...”

“... to clear. Operation Yellowhammer, the no-deal contingency plan commissioned after Boris Johnson took office, assumed waiting times as long as two and a half days as a result of new documentation requirements for which the majority of HGV operators would be unprepared. Even tiny additional processing delays would cause a significant knock-on effect. They ...”

“... 18 notebooks with spiritual reflections and saw the face of the Lord in the leaves of a tree. He took communion and confessed his sins. Then, in April 1993, he stumbled on another story, about a young boy who had lost all his senses; he was lifeless but still alive. At the thought of such futile suffering, Carrère’s faith folded. ‘I forsake ...”