“... how TUC delegates fêted Delors with a chorus of ‘Frère Jacques’ after a speech which they read as a promise to undo in Brussels what Thatcher had done to them in the UK. But Delors was also a champion of ‘completing the single market’, as the phrase went, and in this was enthusiastically supported by Thatcher. In practice, it meant getting states ...”

“... the days of Ronald Reagan has Russia played such a prominent role in US political life. After Donald Trump’s shock victory – greeted in the Russian parliament with cheers and champagne – came accusations of Russian meddling in the US electoral process, followed in January by the leak of a dossier claiming that the Russian authorities had accumulated ...”

“... he cried, almost at the same moment as my father called back ‘Hullo Sig.’I had not yet read Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man or I might have been reminded of the narrator describing how as a boy on his second day out hunting he sees a fox run across his path; someone ‘holloa’s and before he can stop himself he exclaims: ‘Don’t do that, they’ll ...”

“... Two weeks before​ Donald Trump’s inauguration, I ran into a man who calls himself the Retribution Pastor by the swimming pool at Mar-a-Lago. Joel Tenney, who comes from the largest family in Iowa, had worked to turn out voters for the caucuses last January, and occasionally led the crowds at Trump rallies in prayer ...”

“... down – is in part responsible for his widespread neglect. Even so broad-minded and widely-read a philosopher as Arthur Danto has said that he finds Dewey’s work without interest, because lacking in ‘structure’. Ayer found (and, I imagine, Williams finds) in Dewey only a rubbery amorphous mass of neologisms (‘problematic ...”

“... Moore sinks to his knees straightaway and prays for a considerable period of time, and Piers Paul Read similarly. Some admiration for this, men who pray in public not uncourageous, though more often met with at Catholic rather than Anglican services. The service is conducted by Father Kit Cunningham who talks about Anna, saying how she had summoned him to the ...”

“... grew up in a stable middle-class home: his father was a hard-working dentist, a cultured and well-read man active in local politics; Miles attended Juilliard with a generous weekly allowance from Pops (enough, indeed, to help support an indigent Charlie Parker), and later hung out with writers and artists in postwar Paris. Consequently, some readers of ...”

“... physical and the spiritual. ‘Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy,’ we read of a rare ‘good’ Murdoch character meditating the accusation of paedophilia a child has just levelled against him: ‘He had, or had had, more or less vague sexual feelings about all sorts of things and people, schoolmasters, girls seen on ...”

“... is Tintern Abbey. And there is Hadrian’s Wall. And should I stop in Glasgow for a drink? If you read the novels of Joan Didion, you will see there can come a time in anybody’s life, women’s as much as men’s, when they climb into their car and feel that they are driving away from an entire kingdom of dependency. The motorways don’t offer a ...”

“... to such behaviour because they fall outside the civilising processes of the West. Thus beneath Donald Rumsfeld’s magnificently evasive ‘Stuff happens’ – the formula allows us to think for a second that such things might happen to anyone, including presumably us, or even him – we glimpse a much harsher, discriminatory form of judgment. Between ...”

“... one school in Florida restricted access to ‘The Hill We Climb’, the poem Amanda Gorman read at Joe Biden’s inauguration, after a parent complained that it contained ‘hate messages’.DeSantis is an extreme example of the right’s doublethink around free speech. In that sense he is a boon for more moderate Republicans. His legislative ...”

“... a childhood friend of Matthiessen’s, was brought on as managing editor, and Plimpton enlisted Donald Hall to solicit the poems. They did a lot of drinking together and decided not to publish criticism, placing the emphasis on short stories, poetry and interviews. Styron was around, as were Evan S. Connell, Irwin Shaw and James Baldwin, whom Matthiessen ...”

“... team. To understand fully how central cricket was to Hornung’s vision of England, you need to read Ollie Randall’s superb history of the rise and fall of cricket as the embodiment of Englishness. In the Raffles stories, actual cricket matches barely feature. For those, you must turn to the classics in the genre, such as J.C. Snaith’s Willow the ...”

“... Stuart Arminianism and ceremonialism coloured by the 19th-century Anglican legacy. We may have read too much Trollope, from whose pages it would not be hard to construct the familiar caricature of a worldly, corpulent Jacobean clergy, basking under the lax supervision of courtly bishops. Then there is the hindsight problem. Some distinguished accounts of ...”

“... out for a couple hours … sort of like going to Central Park’.I thought of Joe when I read about Christian Cooper, the black birdwatcher who crossed paths with a white woman and her dog in Central Park on the morning of 25 May, the same day George Floyd was killed when a police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck for nine minutes. There are ...”