“... we prefer not to think about: the idea of putting an end to the wasteful chaos of capitalism by implementing a comprehensive economic plan. Central planning is usually associated with Marxism, though Karl Marx himself expressed only a vague hope of bringing industry under political control and getting rid of ‘haggling’ (Schacher). Friedrich Engels ...”

“... as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin. As for London and Scottish Marine Oil’s Chris Greentree, all that remains of him is a severed ...”

“... completeness, or publishers and readers, were elsewhere. All three cities remained untouched by the Second World War; they were not bombed, nor were they transformed by reconstruction when the war ended. Even in the 1980s and 1990s it was possible to walk around many parts of these cities and notice that nothing much ...”

“... the other, a former head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (as paraphrased by Brian Stone): ‘Only Newton’s laws of motion may enjoy a wider scientific consensus than a human-enhanced greenhouse effect.’ There isn’t consensus, however, either scientific or political, about the best ways to respond to the problem; in part because ...”

“... You​ would be hard pressed to describe Geoffrey Hill’s final work. To say it is a sort of notebook cast as a prose poem in 271 sections of greatly varying length doesn’t get you very far. In one way it is squarely in the tradition of Pope’s Dunciad (which it mentions): it is a poem about the betrayal of England, a yowl of anger and outrage at the prevailing imbecility Hill often addressed in his later works ...”

“... 9.7 million pigs produce ten billion gallons of manure a year.)*President Trump says: ‘I hope to be able to put this up as one of my crowning achievements that I was able to expose something that is truly a cancer in our country.’ He is referring to the FBI.*Pornography star Stormy Daniels provides a detailed description of Donald Trump’s penis. Although ...”

“... editor of Donne, H.J.C. Grierson, gave a series of lectures on Milton and Wordsworth, which began by addressing the attacks on Milton that T.S. Eliot and his acolytes were mounting. The revival of interest in metaphysical poetry, which Grierson had done so much to stimulate, had prompted critics to discuss the connection between form and content in ...”

“... helicopters, came from oil sales under the UN’s Oil for Food Programme, and had been entrusted by the UN Security Council to the Americans to be spent on behalf of the Iraqi people. The CPA didn’t properly check out the courier before handing over the cash, and, as a result, according to an audit report ...”

“... thinking about fascism is to see it as historically specific: a reactionary mass movement produced by the economic and social chaos that engulfed Europe after the First World War. Fascism promised national rebirth through the violent cleansing of enemies at home and conquest abroad; to achieve this required public consent to the undoing of democracy. Where ...”

“... that of Palestine itself. In 1948 the village of his birth, near Ashkelon, was ethnically cleansed by Israeli forces and his family was driven into Gaza, where he was paralysed in a childhood accident. He became a clergyman rebel and a charismatic preacher of national liberation. When not giving sermons at the al-Abbas mosque in Gaza City, Yassin ran a civic ...”

“... too normal for the task. I chafed against the setting down of the facts, as if they could yet be changed. Now, having cast my eye across the charred landscape of Plath-Hughes scholarship, it seems about time for something normal. The Plath-Hughes mythology presents a problem if the first glimpse you had of Plath’s life was the one she lived while ...”

“... On​ 29 January this year, a cello made in 1730 by Nicolò Gagliano, a member of the famous Neapolitan dynasty of luthiers, stood in front of the European Parliament to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It had belonged to Pál Hermann, a Jewish Hungarian composer and virtuoso cellist who had studied under Kodály and Bartók and gave concerts throughout Western and Central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s ...”

“... On​ 18 June, the sixth day of Israel’s attack on Iran, David Petraeus gave some unsolicited advice to Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him to dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment programme or face ‘the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people ...”

“... behind? … Who works when she wants and never neglects her little dumplings?’ She turns out to be a Tupperware sales rep hosting a party for local housewives (the naval bag was full of samples). The advert is about what a woman gains from having a job and her own money. But there’s also a subtext, an eyebrow arched at the liberated housewife faced with ...”

“... to write her memoirs. In 1932, Alexei Tolstoi had presided over a ‘comrades’ court’ set up by the Writers’ Union to hear Mandelstam’s complaint against the novelist Sargidzhan. The Mandelstams were by then in disrepute with the Soviet authorities and the novelist and his wife had been set to spy on them in their ...”