“... into peril? Robinson laughed. ‘In a very simplistic way, yes, I can see that argument … If you took your scenario to the nth degree, shall we say, and looked at the tidal flood risk for the whole of East Anglia, right? Effectively you wouldn’t have anything on it.’Mike Gildersleeves, a senior council planner working across south-east Lincolnshire (aka ...”

“... comes from is required. Born in 1973 in Eindhoven, the company town of Phillips in Brabant, he took history and philosophy at the University of Groningen in the early 1990s. There he joined the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, or VVD, the Dutch variant of a liberal party, and studied under the philosopher of history Frank Ankersmit, a sui ...”

“... At the very least​ we need to ask why it took the fall of Harvey Weinstein to turn the sexual harassment of women into front page news, and whether the endless photo spreads of his female targets weren’t so much designed to provoke outrage or a cry for justice as to grant the voyeur his pleasure. That of course is a pleasure on which the cinema industry thrives and which made these women vulnerable in the first place ...”

“... 1944 of a Benelux Customs Union. It continued with the creation of the Council of Europe in 1949; took wings with the Schuman Plan of 1950, which gave birth to the European Coal and Steel Community the following year; and expanded with the Treaty of Rome into the Common Market of 1957, creating a European Economic Community which by the end of the 1980s had ...”

“... a student at 17 and with whom she later co-authored Freud: The Mind of the Moralist – and Sontag took over McCarthy’s old lemonade stand as Partisan Review’s theatre reviewer. Lines of succession make for neat narratives and it’s fun to fantasise a Margo Channing-Eve Harrington face-off, but Susan Sontag wasn’t the new Mary McCarthy, any more than ...”

“... caught the attention of the world. Three of these were either by-passed or aborted, and the other took a peculiar form, in Brazil. Internationally, the continent became news for the first time in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, when the spectre of guerrilla movements haunted Washington. Brazil was never in the forefront of this turbulence. Compared with ...”

“... and provided a shelter for weeds, vermin and insects’. The major drawback, however, was that it took an Osage orange hedge three or four years to grow to its full height.In time the burgeoning rail network would provide the solution. Wood was already being shipped from the East in vast quantities to be used for house building, and the railways themselves ...”

“... Sabra and Shatila is perfectly clear on Israeli responsibility for, and even complicity with, what took place: I refer here to the Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk’s powerfully concise and brilliant book, Sabra et Chatila: Enquête sur un Massacre, which has still found no established British or American publisher. Facts do not at all speak for ...”

“... but pleasing, somehow, to me. I was nudged in his direction by my graduate supervisor at Oxford, John Bayley, a wonderfully subtle and wide-ranging critic who as far as I’m aware never wrote about Firbank himself. I was embarking on an MLitt thesis looking at the way gay British writers, in the early and mid-20th century, had negotiated the necessary ...”

“... who answered ‘no, probably not’ presumably exercised some hermeneutic charity and took that answer to indicate a lack of certainty about hell’s existence rather than any uncertainty about their own beliefs.) Unfortunately, those who had already answered positively the question about ‘heaven’ were not then asked: ‘So what do you think ...”

“... appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to ...”

“... also joined the Fabians, encouraged by Hugh Dalton, the postwar Labour chancellor. He took it seriously, did a lot of reading, especially about the Webbs’ Minority Report on Poor Law reform, and in the summer of 1910, at the end of his year as president of the Cambridge society, he and Dudley Ward toured the West Country in a caravan, speaking ...”

“... chief priorities of Corbyn’s Labour Party were neatly captured in two speeches made by John McDonnell, his shadow chancellor and often the project’s most eloquent spokesman. In 2016 he declared that Labour members would ‘no longer have to whisper’ the word ‘socialism’: the party would no longer be ashamed of its values. And in the dying ...”

“... And Horace Walpole christened her the Morning Post, after a Private Eye of the time. She took as her second husband the rogue politician Charles Townshend, who seems to have married her for money and influence, and to have gone in fear of her female will. According to J. Steven Watson’s Preface – one of two excellent introductory pieces, the ...”

“... since before the war, was shocked at ‘his face … unimaginably creased and craggy’: ‘it took me some time to rediscover the young face I had known beneath this new mask. Then the two merged and after that I always saw him with a kind of double vision.’ Auden’s admirers have often been drawn to think about him in terms of double vision: some of ...”