“... alive. They are a comic duo called Lemon and Tangerine, played with great relish by Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Their stylistic home is more like Sesame Street than Monty Python. As you will gather, this film is not looking for tonal consistency. The two men are much given to violent, insulting argument – they can’t agree, for ...”

“... the tune: the song became known as ‘A Time for Us’, and was recorded for orchestra by Henry Mancini and later sung by Shirley Bassey, Andy Williams and many others. Time seems to be running backwards for us: the film is haunted by later echoes of what it started. I don’t know where this leaves us, but it’s clear that Rota’s music, throughout ...”

“... at war and marred by the reach of his own urgent ambition. Still, Wilson set the tone for the new power-seeking, crisis-invoking Presidencies of the 20th century when, in his first inaugural address, he proclaimed: This is not a day of triumph; it is a day of dedication. Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. Men’s hearts wait ...”

“... In the post-war world it did not start like that, although appearances were unpromising. When Henry Truman became President on the death of Roosevelt in 1945, it was customary to laugh at him. It was said that the United States had exalted the common, ordinary man, and that they were now landed with one as their leader. But the critics were confounded as ...”

“... By the time Shakespeare and his apprentice John Fletcher co-wrote All Is True (printed as Henry VIII) in 1613, wistfulness for the previous reign was already growing, despite what the playwrights and others may have recalled about Tudor rule: agricultural depression, enclosure, the plague, the poor law and the Essex Rebellion. The play concludes with ...”

“... as well as Welsh and Scottish nationalism. Abroad, and despite the collapse of the ERM, the power of Brussels is increasing. Soon, all Queen Elizabeth II’s subjects will carry much the same kind of passport as their fellow Europeans; and that brave vestige of British self-consequence, ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and ...”

“... and extolling her love of peace, could be used to invoke the glorious days of Elizabethan sea-power, exercised against the hated Spaniard, in sharp contrast to James’s friendship with Spain and refusal to fight for his Protestant son-in-law, the Elector Palatine. From then right up to the present. Elizabeth has gained and James has suffered from the ...”

“... succeeded in easing tensions simply by meeting. Five years later, Khrushchev stormed out of a four-power summit in Paris when Eisenhower refused to apologise for monitoring the USSR with U-2 spy planes. The collapse of the Paris summit led to the Cold War’s most dangerous phase, with the US and USSR nearly going to war over Berlin and Cuba. After the 1962 ...”

“... far from being a debauched libertine Trump is a roaring teetotaller uninterested in much except power and fame. That predilection leads to talk of fascism and Europe in the 1930s, or of a transplanted Oriental despotism. It was always lazy to try to see Trump as part of an international group of autocratic rulers (Modi, Erdoğan, Orbán, Duterte), each of ...”

“... woman’s amatory adventures in stuffy aristocratic households. Like and unlike a foreshadowing of Henry James’s The Awkward Age, ‘Lady Susan’ perhaps startles most by the fact that it doesn’t seem, with all its marvellous originality, quite to come off; it leaves a reader cold. And it does so, because the story is cold. Where ...”

“... philosophers trying hard not to ask themselves why a woman can’t be more like a man. Men, as Henry Higgins pointed out, are so decent, so morally straight. They never mix the personal with the professional. They would never take advantage of a presidential address in order to indict the organisation over which they are presiding. Women allowed to occupy ...”

“... the prevailing conventions. At the very moment when philosophy was questioning its own sources of power and generalisation, everywhere asking, ‘What do we mean when we say this?’, Santayana seized with maddening confidence the very ground his fellows were scrupulously deserting. He restored the delightful to philosophy at a time when philosophy had ceased ...”

“... memory, the defeat of the treaty has been blamed on the bloc of isolationist senators led by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and William E. Borah of Idaho. But these Irreconcilables, as they were called, formed only a minority in the Senate, even one narrowly controlled by the Republicans. The final vote was 49 for the treaty as amended and 35 ...”

“... Modern Goodness. On the other side are the Capitalist George Grosz Money Masturbators, amassing Power in secret vaults.’Babitz’s profiles draw attention to her own preoccupations. The question of ‘getting it right’ recurs (‘it’ being art). In Eve’s Hollywood she describes watching a conductor who would ‘pick a few measures just ahead of ...”

“... Like it or not, ‘Orwell’ is a brand: ordinariness, common decency, speaking plain truths to power, a haggard, prophetic gaze. It is surely some or all of those qualities, rather than any particular political prescience, which have been invoked by the remarkable spike in the sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four following Kellyanne Conway’s notoriously ...”