“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... anti-equal rights – Schlafly was both and a lot more. Her funeral in 2016 was attended by Donald Trump. During his campaign, Buchanan said: ‘What we have is a lawless situation on the southern border of the United States where this country is literally being overrun by people who are violating our immigration laws and defying the American ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... spareness, or what seemed spareness to me then. In fact Life Studies was the first book of his I read; I hadn’t read the earlier rhetorical stuff. I went on to that and didn’t like it. So I ended up loving passionately about six poems in Life Studies. I didn’t particularly like the family poems. They were okay but ...”

“... in Iraq. Nor were the mental blinkers restricted to the field operatives. On 10 September 2001, Donald Rumsfeld announced to a Pentagon audience: ‘Today we declare war on bureaucracy.’ This ‘war on bureaucracy’, inspired in part by Friedman, meant that virtually no effort was made to rebuild the shattered administrative and regulatory machinery in ...”

“... economy grow? Probably more slowly but maybe more reliably. What if everyone were required to read ‘Money Creation in the Modern Economy’? Would capitalism survive? Of course it would. Once collective faith is invested in something, it becomes very hard to shake. ‘The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is ...”

“... and have an air of monumental importance, but they are divided into short, breezy chapters that read like extended blog posts. Still, they’re not without interest. Zemmour is a declinist, in the French tradition that goes back to the 18th century, but his account is an idiosyncratic one. It does not begin with the storming of the Bastille, but with the ...”

“... and the oligarchs who gained ownership of privatised assets.When the media want to discuss whether Donald Trump is a fascist, whether Brexit is an imperialist project or the way pandemics end, historians will be among the experts consulted. The public intellectual in the English-speaking world who has offered the most expansive sociological analyses of 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 ...”

“... is said to like his courtiers to call him Iskander, Arabic for Alexander the Great, and to read tales of his exploits in bed. To deal with remaining naysayers, he decreed that criticism of the king or the crown prince be treated as an act of terror. A new state security service, modelled on Egypt’s Amn El Dawla, an internal intelligence ...”