“... to believe in a peculiar kind of democratic and antiseptic war’, he warned a year before Woodrow Wilson took America into the First World War, should understand that ‘willing war means willing all the evils that are organically bound up with it.’Bourne lost his battle: most of his peers were infected with the war spirit. The United States emerged from ...”

“... like the pockets of comic relief in Shakespearean tragedy. It is far larger and more defining. In David Hawkes’s translation of The Dream, an achievement surpassing Scott Moncrieff’s or later English versions of Proust in the art of delivering one cultural world – a much stranger one – into another, not only is the wit no barrier to an Anglophone ...”

“... Honeysuckle and the Bee’. Not everyone likes this extraordinary story. Both Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis have protested at its terse, incomprehensible oddity, and called it frankly bad. But most other admirers of Kipling, and indeed of good fiction in general, find it in its strange way consummate, haunting and powerful. But a powerful ...”

“... Natalie Rolls, also a Blyth councillor, didn’t return my calls. The town’s Reform mayor, David Swinhoe, was also shy. Nor could I reach the most prominent Reform councillor from Blyth, Barry Elliott, the Trump-like figure who came second to Ronnie Campbell in 2015 and who beat Deirdre Campbell in this year’s county council elections. Elliott is a ...”