“... United States; and he fleshed out a new and noble American sense of mission before he reluctantly took his country into the European war. ‘We are provincials no longer,’ he famously declared in his second inaugural address in March 1917. Though still publicly opposed to American intervention in the war, he insisted that ‘our own fortunes as a nation are ...”

“... the fighters they had trained. In the northern Syrian city of Hama, where the worst fighting took place, more than ten thousand were killed, and the city was reduced to rubble. In al-Suri’s bitter appraisal, the Muslim Brothers had shown their true colours. They had left the Combatant Vanguard to do most of the fighting, seeking instead to build ...”

“... is a bit of an old sod.’He is more critical of Donald Davie, saying in a sympathetic letter to John Montague apropos of a bad review that Davie is a ‘grotesquely shrunken silly imitator of Pound’, the receptacle of every other critic’s ‘dud cartridges & empty cases’, ‘the mincy mean know-all kind of little office snot’. His poetry is ‘all ...”

“... to bring about was unprecedented: ‘This claim is upside down. The dangerous change actually took place in the early 1990s, when American policymakers effectively decided to let the rest of the world make our trade policy.’ This ‘crazy experiment’ was itself unprecedented. Its catastrophic results led to Trump’s election, and one of his major ...”

“... the ambiguities and resorts to conventional wisdom. His list of leaders includes Harry Truman and John Kennedy – two presidents who risked war by exacerbating tensions with the Soviet Union. Dallek views FDR from the perspective of a mid-century liberal who has apparently made his peace with the warfare state. As Dallek sees him, FDR, like his cousin ...”

“... and discontents from Europe and North and South America – by the flame of Revolution.It took twenty-four hours to fly to Cuba from Europe in those days, the Iberia Viscount touching down on all the islands in the mid-Atlantic on the way. I had two volumes of the collected works of Thomas Balogh in my luggage, required reading for progressive Latin ...”

“... Early last year,​Jeremy Corbyn and his wife went to Newcastle and took the bus the short distance up the coast to Blyth in Northumberland, to see their old friend, the former Labour MP and miners’ leader Ronnie Campbell, who was gravely ill. It was a private visit by one left-wing insubordinate to another, by a campaigner who tried to re-radicalise Labour to one of his most loyal supporters ...”

“... and finally unbreakable. He mentions Tommy Dorsey again (‘I may be the only singer who ever took vocal lessons from a trombone’), and Ben Webster (one of the first acts showcased on Sinatra’s own Reprise label). But a third influence is more notable, and an indication of just how deeply jazz was lodged in the young singer’s soul: the tenor ...”

“... by levelling a tax on every financial transaction. It has been embraced by the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, and 11 European countries plan to introduce something like it, called the Financial Transaction Tax. Britain will not be one of those countries while the Conservatives are in charge. Shifting vast, destabilising amounts of money from place to ...”

“... most extraordinary sounds were produced by the trumpeters Bubber Miley and Cootie Williams (who took Miley’s place in 1929) and the trombonist Joe Nanton, whose nickname ‘Tricky Sam’ projected the essence of ‘jungle’ techniques. Following the example of King Oliver, they developed a wider variety of often speech-like growling and wa-wa sounds by ...”

“... illegitimate child yet struggles on to become the hard-working wife of an immigrant farmer, Cather took a story of ‘poor peasants’ – Mencken wrote approvingly in 1919 – and drew from it ‘the eternal tragedy of man’. Reviewing her early novels in the Nation, Carl Van Doren praised both her democratic outlook and ‘elemental’ vision of human ...”

“... chance, should verbally embody a tiny chunk of his own name must have been a special treat. He took his camper van to Italy in 1926, where it was admired by the Pope and by Mussolini, both of whom accepted commemoratory photographs of this forward-looking contraption. In this case, as so often, Roussel’s seemingly unworldly eccentricity turned out to be ...”

“... bold, confident, proud, unembarrassed, modern, European, grand. We were none of these things under John Major, and only partly one or two of them under Mrs Thatcher when we went to war. Furthermore, it was a very open, self-imperilling and therefore very trusting thing for a leader to do. Blair didn’t just take the national mood as fixed, he set about ...”

“... Myself’, a strange mixture of swagger and meekness, clang and human: Like thousands, I took just pride and more than just, struck matches that brought my blood to a boil; I memorised the tricks to set the river on fire – somehow never wrote something to go back to. Can I suppose I am finished with wax flowers and have earned my grass on the minor ...”

“... bright, and when things did alter it was practically overnight.10 February. When Stephen Fry took off last year I came in for one or two of the jobs he’d been contracted to do, notably a couple of voice-overs for children’s cartoons. Telephoned by the same company last week I agree to do another in a Posy Simmons animated film about a pig who acts a ...”