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“... would lie with the National Security Council Adviser, Richard Allen. Under Nixon, and again under Carter, rivalry between the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of State had resulted in the departure of the latter. Haig was determined to block any repetition of the ruthless way he had seen Secretary Rogers cut out of the chain of command by Richard ...”

“... less important as a signifier of classiness. (I was pleased to discover that, 23 years apart, Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono both chose John Lennon’s ‘Beautiful Boy’ as their favourite record.)Despite its slightly lacklustre start, Desert Island Discs picked up a following and ran for 67 episodes before being mothballed in 1946 after BBC radio was ...”

“... regard the United States as a power as dangerous as any other. In reaction to the quietism of the Carter era, American foreign policy has become ultra-activist in both word and deed. This has gone down well with the voters. American public opinion was intensely proud of the successful invasion of the tiny island of Grenada. There was similar exaltation when ...”

“... tax system? Didn’t they notice what was going on? This is the question that Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson tackle in Winner-Take-All Politics. They don’t spend much time talking about offshore, but the story they tell has striking parallels with the one laid out by Shaxson. One of the ways you can identify an offshore environment, according to ...”

“... In reviewing one of these books, I must ‘declare an interest’. Paul Johnson’s is a volume in the Mainstream Series of which I am an editor, although I have had no connection with this collection of essays other than strongly approving in principle that he should publish some of his most pungent and vigorous articles, which would otherwise have remained buried in journals and newspapers ...”

“... of which Boulez is no doubt keenly aware. Among Boulez’s contemporaries, Stockhausen, Elliott Carter and John Cage are notably eloquent and prolific commentators on themselves. Boulez’s writing covers a considerable range: he is not just a theorist like Messiaen in Technique of My Musical Language or Hindemith in The Craft of Musical Composition, but ...”

“... by a sharp reversal both in Britain and the USA, with the result that a composer like Elliott Carter has almost nothing to say about him that isn’t prosaic. Yet Sibelius seems uncannily to anticipate Carter’s interest in new ways of achieving continuity and flow, in the pun on ‘movement’ as a formal unit and ...”

“... sisters from the house of Denmark. Wilhelm and Nicholas II were both great-great-grandsons of Tsar Paul I. The kaiser’s great-great-aunt, Charlotte of Prussia, was the tsar’s grandmother. Viewed from this perspective, the outbreak of war in 1914 looks rather like the culmination of a family feud. As its subtitle suggests, Miranda ...”

“... ours rested not so much on military prowess as on economic primacy.’ The last chapters of Paul Kennedy’s epic study suggest that American power is subsiding relative to other powers rather than dying. Vidal sees himself as the literary chronicler of the rise and decline of American power. His latest novel begins as the Spanish-American War of 1898 ...”

“... I met​ Carter Page. And who’s he? For anyone not up to speed with the endless comings and goings in Trumpworld, the Washington Post edition of the Mueller report provides a helpful guide to its teeming cast of characters. Carter Page: An energy consultant with experience working in Moscow, Carter Page was named a national security adviser to Donald Trump’s campaign in March 2016 ...”

“... In 1997, the Princeton economist Paul Krugman wrote an article entitled ‘In Praise of Cheap Labour’ in the online magazine Slate, suggesting that those concerned about conditions in Third World sweatshops ought to save their tears for a worthier cause. The greatest beneficiaries of free trade, Krugman declared, ‘are, yes, Third World workers ...”

“... an astrological interpretation of it entitled The Dragon of the Apocalypse and written by Frederic Carter, who was instrumental in getting Lawrence going on the subject; and three lengthy rejected fragments from his book, which contain some of the liveliest and most interesting material in the entire compendium. We are indebted to the editor of the present ...”

“... from the Surrealists, especially since this novel takes place in a Paris that is decidedly Paul Eluard’s capitale de la douleur. And, at this stage, Stead is omnivorously assimilating influences from every conceivable source. She is also a self-consciously brilliant young writer. The Beauties and Furies is evidence of a love-affair with language ...”

“... Maureen Duffy. His sleep must have been poisoned for years by worries about properly dating Piers Paul Read’s A Married Man. It is, in fact, a disaster to fill a book like this with storms of names and endless lists; narrative gets shouted down by the encyclopedic. But there are many valuable discussions: Stevenson shows that much postwar fiction was ...”

“... must go. Obama has a larger-spirited wish to help people than any of his predecessors since Jimmy Carter; though caution bordering on timidity has kept him from speaking with Carter even once in the last five years. Obama roots for the good cause but often ends up endorsing the acceptable evil on which the political class ...”