“... the Democrats, with a deal to keep government running, then threatened to invoke emergency powers to build the wall his right-wing base demands, and at last offered a hint of moderate conciliation. In the meantime the actually existing Trump administration was falling apart in several directions. It was also adding new members who have committed it to ...”

“... to stay on at Ferox Hall to recover (it was this accident that prompted him to hire an assistant, Michael Faraday). In 1815, the year before Mary Shelley wrote her story about the reanimating powers of electricity, Children constructed the most powerful galvanic battery yet invented, for which he received the Royal ...”

“... prised them, it sets out to judge the degree to which the drama was or was not complicit with the powers of the state that seem to sustain it. Second, by inserting the ‘afterlives’ of the plays into subsequent history and by historicising salient features of ‘literature’ and ‘criticism’, it offers to assess their use as instruments of present ...”

“... isolation of orthography from any consideration of the forms which the artist represents, the powers of invention displayed, the purpose of the drawing and the medium employed. Even when practised by connoisseurs of drawing earlier this century – most notably Berenson – the attempt to define Michelangelo’s style ran into problems. It is not absurd ...”

“... she quoted an exchange between Joan of Arc and her interrogators about her vision of the archangel Michael: ‘How did you know that it was St Michael?’ ‘By the way he spoke and his language of angels.’ ‘How did you know it was the language of angels?’ ‘I soon believed it was. I wanted to believe that it ...”

“... US Defense Shield, Armageddon has retreated further. In The Globalisation of World Politics (2001) Michael Cox pointed out that today ‘nuclear war is far less likely to happen,’ even though there has been an increase in the number of wars. Later in the same volume Andrew Linklater maintained that ‘there is no doubt that globalisation and fragmentation ...”

“... other writers.’ As Gelpi rightly points out, Day Lewis did always have his defenders. Early on, Michael Roberts claimed that From Feathers to Iron (1931) was ‘a landmark, in the sense in which Leaves of Grass, A Shropshire Lad, Des Imagistes and The Waste Land were landmarks’. And on the occasion of his death, Kingsley Amis declared that Day ...”

“... McCluskie remains in prison. It is customary to think of long sentences and long stretches as Michael Howard’s contribution to British penal policy, but he is merely the latest in a long, if occasionally interrupted, line of social conservatives with a particular interest in correction. When, in October 1993, he announced to the Conservative Party ...”

“... value of dislocation. As he says in ‘Place and Displacement’ (1984), the work of Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Heaney himself resembles that of the young Wordsworth – loyal to Revolutionary France but attached to England – in that political and cultural dislocation in Ulster makes their experience of belonging plural. It would be ...”

“... were activities hugely dependent on the navies, armies and trading companies of the big imperial powers. The mutiny on the Bounty ruined a mission in imperial botany: Lieutenant William Bligh’s task had been to secure breadfruit trees from Tahiti, then carry them to the Caribbean to provide cheap food for slaves on the sugar-cane plantations. (The trees ...”

“... in Austerlitz W.G. Sebald discusses the bureaucratese of genocide. In emphasising the formative powers of language and the irrational lure of supercharged meanings, Cassirer aligns himself with a familiar principle of cultural critique. But these late thoughts never developed into a sociology. The English translations of the three volumes of The Philosophy ...”

“... about Hitler’s triumphalist Berlin Olympics of 1936 but it is not often remembered that the Axis Powers hoped to stage a complete Olympic takeover. The 1940 Olympics were to be held in Tokyo and Mussolini tried hard to get the 1944 games for Rome (though London won). Hitler told Albert Speer it would be all right to build an outsize stadium for the 1936 ...”

“... furious bewilderment and confusion, an effect which, like a mad scene in an opera, demands strong powers of control. On stage, the poise vanishes, raw pain taking its place. Several lacerating exchanges between Medea and Jason are taken directly from Aftermath, and the feelings Cusk’s heroine expresses pick up from her own uncomprehending sense of wreckage ...”

“... The vote​ for Donald Trump may well have been what Michael Moore called the ‘biggest fuck-you ever recorded in human history’, delivered by the white working class to spite ‘the establishment’. But it isn’t just the size of the fuck-you that matters; it’s also who delivers it. A fuck-you can be sent via satirical parties (Iceland’s Best Party won the election for mayor of Reykjavik; Hungary’s Two-Tailed Dog Party had a hand in sabotaging Viktor Orbán’s recent anti-refugee referendum), or subversive parties (the Pirates), or grassroots movements turned parties (Podemos ...”

“... he discovered a more promising research area: the phenomenon of repulsion in a magnetic field that Michael Faraday had recently termed ‘diamagnetism’. In 1851 he returned to Britain, relying for money on teaching and journalism, particularly for the Philosophical Magazine, edited by William Francis (later of Taylor and Francis, the popular scientific ...”