“... that she wants greater reconciliation between the two countries. If she shakes hands with Gerry Adams then she signals that we will have to learn not to marginalise Sinn Fein, but include them in our lives, all the better to tame them. At the beginning of November she said to NBC that she was aware of the ‘extraordinary changes in marriage law and the ...”

“... no higher honour that can be accorded a skateboarder than to be considered a thrasher. And, though Tony Hawk is the most famous skater in the world, and has had a video game named after him, he’s never been a thrasher. Thrasher used to sneer at those of us who carried our skateboards. So for years I would skate up hills, which is much harder and slower than ...”

“... boulevard entertainment: ‘a flashpot-and-sheet-metal theatre of noise and exclamation’, in Tony Kushner’s words in his essay ‘Eugene O’Neill: The Native Eloquence of Fog’. When the notion of being a writer first seized O’Neill’s imagination, he saw himself as a novelist, as the latest of his many biographers, Robert Dowling, points ...”

“... Tony Blair emerges from these memoirs as a man of extraordinary intellectual self-confidence. He likes to think for himself, and decide for himself, whatever the issue. He takes this to be one of the key attributes of leadership, and it is why he believes he was cut out for it while other people (you can guess who) were not ...”

“... Hammer, head of the National Rifle Association, as well as Louis Farrakhan, George Wallace, Gerry Adams and others. After the interview with Adams, John was disinvited from a party for Tony Blair.One person John very much wanted to interview was Fidel Castro. There was hope that it might ...”

“... Adam, one of a batch of the newest generation of robots to come on the market: 12 male Adams and 13 female Eves. They’re quite something: this Adam is ‘compactly built, square-shouldered, dark-skinned, with thick black hair swept back … with a hint of hooked nose suggestive of fierce intelligence’ – which makes it quite funny when the ...”

“... took place at Beijing airport on Monday, 21 February 1972. It’s also the opening scene of John Adams’s opera Nixon in China, premiered in Houston in 1987, and staged again at the London Coliseum over a few evenings last summer. An actual occurrence then, but also, as Adams and his librettist Alice Coleman understood, a ...”

“... Countries sometimes disappear and leave nothing behind but some postage stamps. But Papas and Adams go on and on.’ He much prefers sparring with a big and capable admirer like Leon Wieseltier than passing on news to his family. And yet he was a dab hand at writing recommendations – we find a good many here, for Guggenheims and Nobels – and he ...”

“... The latter has worked fruitfully (the small-scale pieces Bow Down and Yan Tan Tethera) with Tony Harrison, another poet avid for theatrical and operatic activity; and his most recent full-length opera, Gawain, has an ambitious verse libretto by David Harsent. Ted Hughes once wrote a libretto for Gordon Crosse. The Story of Vasco, whose subject-matter ...”

“... slavery as their vote-getter, while the new Republicans, descendants of the Federalist Party of Adams and Washington, took their stand on anti-slavery and free labour. ‘I remember once being much amused,’ Lincoln wrote in a letter of 1859, at seeing two partially intoxicated men engage in a fight with their great-coats on, which fight, after a long, and ...”

“... took down a Palestinian flag at City College and replaced it with an American flag, Mayor Eric Adams said: ‘Blame me for being proud to be an American … We’re not surrendering our way of life to anyone.’ This was, of course, a ludicrous expression of xenophobia – and it’s hard to imagine Adams, or any ...”

“... were never given an address, but their accents suggested London or its suburbs, perhaps close to Tony Hancock’s place in East Cheam, definitely somewhere below the middle of the social scale, a place where couples necked in front parlours and publicans called ‘Time, gentlemen, please,’ but not so far down as to be picturesque and identifiable and ...”

“... published in the LRB (5 August). The idea for the poem came from a comment in an excellent book by Tony Sharpe on Wallace Stevens, in which he speculates on the flocks of pigeons mentioned in the last lines of ‘Sunday Morning’: And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to ...”

“... described her as ‘the most ignorant politician of her level that I’d come across until I met Tony Blair’, but he thought she was at least touchingly aware of her ignorance, ‘the eternal scholarship girl’. He summed it up by saying: ‘I always liked her, but she always bored me a bit.’ Being boring is a sin for an intellectual. But it is not ...”

“... long been the subjects of complaints to the UK by the regimes they had fled. After 9/11, however, Tony Blair professed a desire to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with President Bush. It would have been difficult to match Bush’s executive onslaught on constitutional rights in the US, by means of the Patriot Act; the designation of ‘enemy ...”