“... reluctant to leave their respective countries, and only did so to attend conferences of the great powers. But Churchill could hardly wait to get on a boat or a plane for a Cook’s Tour of the battlefields, or meetings with exotic foreign potentates. Three of his four Christmases as prime minister were spent overseas. He made so many flights around the ...”

“... was printed called Lachrymae Musarum, the Tears of the Muses for this most hopeful young nobleman. Michael Gearin-Tosh, in Essays and Studies, has cogently argued that this was an opportunity for poets of royalist sympathies covertly to mourn Charles I’s execution. Marvell contributed a beautiful and haunting little poem, but young Dryden’s effort is in ...”

“... rest of us sat in the kitchen biting our nails and covering our ears as my father, upstairs, gave Michael the beating of his life for that. Another time, the whole family had to sit in front of a children’s panel. That’s what happens in Scotland if a child under 16 commits an offence: the social work department calls in the whole family in an effort to ...”

“... the lives of tens of thousands of civilians.Among earlier fiction to come out of the civil war, Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost (2000) is set during the early phases and the linked stories in Romesh Gunesekera’s Noontide Toll (2014) in its aftermath. There’s also Samanth Subramanian’s compelling non-fiction account, based on interviews with ...”

“... at that, now,’ her mother, a perfume magnate whose Protestant husband died nastily for Michael Collins, says of a cup of tea: ‘Strong enough to trot a mouse on.’ He amuses himself, also, by playing up the hero’s drink problem – Marlowe has to be helped into a taxi, passes out in his clothes, throws up – and having him grouse about his ...”

“... was late to take an interest. There are no druids in Shakespeare, not even in Cymbeline. Michael Drayton repeatedly mentions them, but uses both the ‘horrid sacrificer’ and ‘wise philosopher’ images impartially. Milton seems to have first welcomed them as sagacious fellow poets, but then either caught up with Tacitus or had his anti-papal ...”

“... efforts to tackle climate change over the course of the first decade of the 21st century. Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in his fifties. But it’s been thirty years since Richard Feynman hailed Beard’s research as ‘magic’ at the 1972 Solvay Conference, and the Beard-Einstein Conflation – the details of which are for obvious ...”

“... not register on the watchdogs’ computer screens. Despite this, in May, the CIA director, Michael Hayden, claimed that al-Qaida had suffered a ‘near-strategic defeat’. And the British government’s National Security Strategy, released in March, concluded that terrorism ‘does not at present amount to a strategic threat’. Those confident ...”

“... is worse than her bite, and several stories, including Ugrešić’s, have her using her magic powers on behalf of strays or her protégés. Ugrešić is a parodist with many voices, and gives her translators a tricky task: in Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, the ends of chapters echo the traditional storyteller’s rhyming envois (‘What about us? We keep ...”

“... likely to put modern readers in mind of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other pop stars like Michael Jackson and Madonna.’ Yes, precisely. From the outset Liszt is characterised as a celeb whose life was bounded by the 19th-century equivalents of the private jet, the billion dollar yacht and the bevy of air-brained blondes. It’s true that there was a ...”

“... Kamala Harris was endorsed by most of George W. Bush’s national security team, including Michael Hayden, James Clapper, Robert Blackwill and Richard Haass – a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment. This has led to some barrel-scraping on the part of the Republicans. For director of the CIA, Trump has chosen John Ratcliffe, his final ...”

“... selection preserves an argument between Polyidus and Minos over whether Polyidus should use his powers to revive Glaucus. Their discussion hinges on the limits of human knowledge and the abuse of power. Minos advances a theory of natural kingship: just as the dolphin rules over the sea, the eagle over birds and Zeus over the gods, the tyrant commands those ...”

“... Shallows. Carr thinks that he was himself an unwitting victim of the computer’s mind-altering powers. Now in his early fifties, he describes his life as a ‘two-act play’, ‘Analogue Youth’ followed by ‘Digital Adulthood’. In 1986, five years out of college, he dismayed his wife by spending nearly all their savings on an early version of the ...”

“... the politics of deconstruction are notoriously open to dispute, claimants on the left (like Michael Ryan) asserting its indispensability to Marxist critique, while others – among them Terry Eagleton – see it as merely a last-ditch retreat from pressing social and political realities. But it is certainly a central part of Derrida’s project to ...”

“... established itself as a new Sparta; and in the rest of the world, where the inability of Western powers to condemn Israel’s conduct – much less bring it to an end – has made a mockery of the rules-based order that they claim to uphold.After the 1967 war, Isaac Deutscher recalled a German phrase, ‘Man kann sich totsiegen’ – ‘you can triumph ...”