“... Archbishop of Lima. There are some heart-tugging moments, too. The discovery that Alf Ramsey took elocution lessons and described his parents as living ‘in Dagenham, I believe’ doesn’t devalue the power of his exhortation to an exhausted England team about to play extra time: ‘You’ve won the World Cup once. Now go out and win it ...”

“... over to the monks of Ampleforth to be crammed, successfully, for a history scholarship to Oxford. John Peet ended up as head of the Reuters bureau in Berlin, before defecting to the East in 1950. Gavin Ewart, whose poems now seem the high-spot of Out of Bounds, went to Cambridge with an exhibition to read classics; he left Wellington with some farewell verses ...”

“... read poetry. Ian Hamilton edited a selection of Lewis’s work, and there is a good biography by John Pikoulis. But his achievement has been hard to focus on. He moved quickly as a poet, and the poetry he wrote while on home service is markedly different from that written after his arrival in India in December 1942. There are also short stories, among the ...”

“... ongoing projects elsewhere: Jean-Marie Le Pen and Umberto Bossi, for example, or Ian Paisley and John Hume, who are merely adding a third Parliamentary seat to those they already hold at Westminster and in the Northern Ireland Assembly. A number of MEPs first achieved celebrity in other fields: Dana, the Irish Eurovision popstar, Michael Cashman, one-time ...”

“... that such a tag would seem appropriate to describe any other poet of the 20th century. Why her? John Ashbery’s praise for Bishop as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’, whose work ‘inspires in writers of every sort’ an ‘extraordinarily intense loyalty’, seems apt. And Ashbery knew that to say such a thing might be to pay ‘an ambiguous ...”

“... American writing that have flourished and endured. Wolff sidestepped Postmodern elders such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Paul Metcalf, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None ...”

“... of 1949 was designed to challenge the ‘false doctrines’ of communism in the Third World. John F. Kennedy set up the US Agency for International Aid in 1961 and in 1971 USAID was joined by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (which was absorbed into the Development Finance Corporation in 2019). In the eye of this hurricane of acronyms, two ...”

“... wars, the eruption of 1794 was, at least from a cartoonist’s point of view, fortuitous.John Brewer’s large and somewhat rambling survey of the cultural significance of Vesuvius begins with an attempt to draw a single thread from this tangled story. He starts with a visitors’ book, now in the Harvard library, which covers the period from ...”

“... in his filial loyalty. An early test of parliamentary allegiance arose in 1769 after the outlawed John Wilkes returned to London to contest the seat of the City of London and his supporters were fired on by soldiers. Fox, still on good terms with North and his ministers, spoke against Wilkes in the Commons, where his chief antagonist was Burke. Burke told the ...”

“... enjoyed its biggest success with an 11-day rebellion in London in spring 2019. Tens of thousands took part in this prolonged disruption. A large pink boat was wheeled to the junction of Oxford Street and Regent Street; activists glued themselves to the hull, as they did to the London Stock Exchange and the Treasury; Waterloo Bridge was blocked. By the end of ...”

“... made it past the frontier. His passeur Lazare Cabrero, a Spanish republican, shot him in the head, took his money and buried his body. A decade later, the corpse was discovered and Cabrero arrested. At the trial, he claimed that Jacques had broken his ankle, leaving him no choice: his orders were to kill the seriously wounded rather than abandon them in the ...”

“... as if Russell Brand were to land the role of Hamlet. But composure was not Rosa’s métier. He took fright when the Chigi, butts of his satire, took over the papacy in 1655, sent his mistress and their son out of town, then cursed his own cowardice: ‘Am I the person who let himself believe that he was the foremost man ...”

“... choices available seem to be between different percentages of loss. It’s no surprise that Davis took nearly three years to translate Madame Bovary: some translations need as long as the book itself took to write, a few even longer. John Rutherford’s magisterial version of Leopoldo ...”

“... authorship must surely have been collective, the planning long-term and meticulous. The killing of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, or the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001, are the two major vortices into which conspiracy theorists have been sucked in our own time, generating ever more elaborate explanations and ...”

“... who spouts off.’ He paused. ‘That’s not to say we’re not a militant union. Last year we took more industrial action than all the other TUC unions put together. I’ve had more than thirty years overseeing industrial action. But the aim of the action has got to be a show of power in order to reach an agreement. It’s not going to change the ...”