“... pressed for UN troops to be sent into Somalia, Boutros Boutros-Ghali opposed the mission. Annan took the American line. His superior, Marrack Goulding, was duly removed, and Annan put in charge of all peacekeeping operations, as they would now be called, in February 1993. A year later, in January 1994, he received an urgent cable from Roméo Dallaire, the ...”

“... sometimes looks ghastly; Eden was a seriously ill man who did his best to appear well. Blair also took a Caribbean holiday when the war was over (staying at Cliff Richard’s luxury holiday home on Barbados), but unlike Eden, he showed no sign of having lost either his appetite or his nerve on his return. Indeed, Blair and his colleagues – with their ...”

“... tile’. Benjamin is not alone in using these metaphors; both Ruskin and Lawrence (who probably took it from Ruskin) use Rome as a metaphor for the imperial, the finished, the perfected, as against the multifariousness of, say, the Gothic, the ‘barbaric’, the non-Western. Benjamin doesn’t quite romanticise the primitive as Lawrence at least appears ...”

“... ran against Trump in the primaries; the two most prominent Republicans in the host state (Governor John Kasich and Senator Rob Portman); and scores of Senate and Congress members, governors and mayors nervously up for re-election, facing the prospect of having to defend or refute whatever would be Trump’s latest wacky pronouncement and losing voters either ...”

“... made a series of ten podcasts on the murder of Benazir Bhutto called The Assassination. It took more than a year to get it commissioned, during which time many promises were made and broken, and my emails were routinely left unanswered. By the time the series was finally commissioned, my producer and I had just ten weeks before the first episode was ...”

“... of the Jews’. Indeed, ‘almost all Americans, and certainly the majority of American Jews’, took pride in the role played by the US Armed Forces in defeating Hitler. A reversal took place after 1967. Phrases such as ‘the world’s silence’, ‘the world’s indifference’ and ‘the abandonment of the ...”

“... Proms. Think Morning Service at the village church, carols from King’s College Cambridge, Elton John singing to the nation from Westminster Abbey. Think popular music in general and, when Plato brings in a parallel from the visual arts, forget the Tate Gallery and recall the advertisements that surround us everywhere. Above all, think about the way all this ...”

“... history that displays her influence seems very local, mostly confined to the New York poetry of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara or the writing of Andy Warhol, though in fact so much of Hemingway’s manner of writing – the short, paratactic sentences, the use of repetition, the idea of removing the obvious subject – was taken from her, so the whole ...”

“... US and Britain cope with mass death and the destruction of livelihoods. Covid-19 shattered what John Stuart Mill called ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion’, forcing many to realise that they live in a broken society, with a carefully dismantled state. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it in May, unequal and unhealthy societies are ‘a good breeding ...”

“... British Isles, Europe, Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way. I have always looked to the poet John Hewitt’s manifesto in order to salvage a coherent identity. He wrote: I’m an Ulsterman of planter stock. I was born in the island of Ireland, so secondarily I’m an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago and English is my native tongue, so I am ...”

“... but one of Hassan’s spiritual protégés, a local nationalist called Douglas Moore, took up his cause in the mid-1970s on the city council. Long controlled by racist Southern Democrats, DC won the right to elect its own mayor in 1973, when Congress passed the Home Rule Act; a year later, it elected a black mayor, Walter E. Washington, thereby ...”

“... Dwight Macdonald recalled. He was simply, bathetically, Delmore. Schwartz once conceded to John Berryman that ‘Delmorean’ would be the word used should his ‘verse prove attractive to posterity’. Posterity has not proved kind, something Ben Mazer’s edition of Schwartz’s Collected Poems sets out to redress. But this sprawling volume is no ...”

“... for anything I’ve ever done,’ he told an interviewer in 2019. Even the idea of making films took him by surprise. One evening in 1967, he was working in his studio at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts when he found himself imagining the wind wafting through one of his canvases: ‘Oh, a moving painting.’When Lynch died earlier this year, aged ...”

“... of it all is not recorded. Perhaps she was lying down. The women in the Larkin household always took second place, which, in Motion’s view, is half the trouble. Kitty, Larkin’s older sister (‘the one person in the world I am confident I am superior to’), scarcely figures at all. Hers would, I imagine, be a dissenting voice, more brunt-bearing than ...”

“... of the attentiveness called for, and it ended in tears. Remembering this debacle, he later took a strong line about feminine demands on him, somewhat in the manner of Dick in The Devil’s Disciple. Among those he tormented were Edith Bland, whose husband Hubert was unfaithful. Failing to get Shaw into bed, she made her famous complaint: ‘You had no ...”