“... editors and academics.The government’s ‘Levelling Up’ white paper – masterminded by Michael Gove and released in February – gave these people something to chew on. It is full of rhetorical ambition: ‘system change is not about a string of shiny, but ultimately shortlived, new policy initiatives. It is about root and branch reform of ...”

“... a soldier who seemed old enough to be in charge. ‘We are not going to hurt anybody,’ Father Michael Dougherty of Lansing, Michigan said. ‘We just want access to this place’ – he pointed north – ‘to Jerusalem.’ From the checkpoint, Jerusalem was a ten-minute drive. A young American marcher urged the soldiers: ‘Come, join us in ...”

“... sure.15 January. Alan Rickman dies. In the first week of The Habit of Art at the National in 2009 Michael Gambon, playing Auden, was taken ill and rushed to St Thomas’s. He recovered quite quickly, and indeed got out of the ambulance saying: ‘I know what they’re all doing now – sitting up in the canteen recasting.’ Which indeed we were, with my ...”

“... in Rome; that same year she founded the Atreju Festival, named after one of the heroes in Michael Ende’s fantasy novel The Neverending Story, an enduring influence alongside Tolkien (MSI activists had set up a Camp Hobbit in 1977). The festival continues to be held, featuring international stars of the far right from Steve Bannon to Viktor Orbán ...”

“... function of the DPP under the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985 than to give the DPP formal powers to instruct the police. This is partly because of the acknowledged weakness of the CPS in its early years and partly because in any case we thought the right relationship more likely to evolve through consultation under guidelines mutually agreed than ...”

“... been balanced by the legislature? In the United States, Congress has been reluctant to grant new powers to suppress information. That is the reason why Presidents have increasingly asked courts to act in the absence of legislation. But it is the very reason why courts should take care before making new law. Those are the themes that I see in the American ...”

“... National Guard to be sent to Central America at a time when other Democratic governors, such as Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, were refusing the poisoned chalice. Indeed, it was Clinton’s flexibility in the matter of this criminal and covert war (not unlike his subsequent haste to change sides and be on the winning side in the Gulf conflict) that won ...”

“... cabinet secretary, whose own power was further restricted by Jonathan Powell being given similar powers as Blair’s chief of staff. Johnson would give the same powers to Dominic Cummings. Within two years of taking power, New Labour had sacked or moved on 17 of the 19 information chiefs in Whitehall. Cummings’s ...”

“... the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, made the ecoterrorist a pop cultural staple. The nadir was Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear (2004), in which a group of eco-extremists fake climate disasters for political ends. Crichton appended various denialist tracts to the text, though its paranoid reading of climate politics was a few years ahead of the ...”

“... believed ‘low-yield’ nukes would be more effective in deterring ‘emerging nuclear powers like North Korea and Iran’. These new earth-penetrating weapons would have hardened casings (probably made of depleted uranium) enabling them ‘to crash through thick rock and concrete’. Opponents in the Senate argued that repealing the Bill would ...”

“... his superhuman consumption of Player’s, and all the benzedrine, could hardly have helped. But Michael Davidson, an early mentor, was not alone in seeking a more symbolic explanation and in seeing ‘those singular corrugations’ as the ‘seismic result of terrific intellectual commotion’. Auden seemed in later years to have been encased behind a great ...”

“... meant no judicial inquiry, no prosecution, and instead a Fatal Accident Inquiry with no powers to subpoena which declined to investigate how the bomb got on the plane for fear of interfering with police inquiries. As political players grow old, they reminisce and sometimes they forget what they are meant to have said or not said. Five years later ...”

“... 14-liner Pushkin invented for Eugene Onegin. This last he adopts for his letter from Moscow to Michael Frayn. Here the subject curdles unpleasantly and James the Cold Warrior puts in an appearance. I am sorry to see him joining Bernard Levin in offering a thanksgiving for the bomb which has guaranteed four decades of peace in Europe. It’s true that any ...”

“... incidentally, infects the career of Augustus, who skilfully dressed his growing powers in language which evoked the forms and conventions of the Republic. The real history of the period is at best ambiguous. Shakespeare’s conception of the period inclines, it seems to me, to the interpretation that the Empire began with Augustus. We are ...”

“... at ‘government by consultation’, strengthening the country’s postwar prospects by the use of powers delegated from Westminster. He gave Scotland what he thought was good for it. There were lots of Plans. After the war, planners with more clout imposed UK-wide plans, including centralised nationalisation, on Scotland, and the Labour tradition of support ...”