“... hinted at in the text, has recently been trumpeted by the journalists Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh in The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, which is largely a popularisation of Robert Eisenman’s theories. Unsurprisingly, Baigent and Leigh contribute an effusive blurb to this book. Eisenman for his part has been putting himself forward as the ...”

“... in the same city in 1968, when politics was still for real. (The Mayor of Chicago is still called Richard Daley, but with the mediocre son all resemblance ends.) The irony, such as it was, occurred at the expense of the journalistic profession, which is why I say that they awoke, or half-awoke, to what they had done. Ever since the preceding Republican ...”

“... Vaizey has no doubt at all. ‘They were the best.’ Hugh Gaitskell, Iain Macleod, Richard Titmuss, Anthony Crosland and Edward Boyle. They were all ‘clever, honest, admirable and honourable’. They were all, except Boyle, who was at school at the time, affected by the slump. They were all excited by the political changes and administrative advances of the war ...”

“... The Cordon Bleu to the War is gone,     In the ranks of death you’ll find him. His snow-white apron is girded on     And his magic stove behind him. ‘Army beef,’ says the Cordon Bleu,     ‘Though a stupid bungler slays thee, One skilful hand thy steaks shall stew,     One artist’s pan shall braise thee.’ (That field ...”

“... explained to his mother. What he did not tell her was how he had landed such a grand invitation. Richard Ingleby cannot tell us either, but Kahn was the first of many men and women to be charmed by Wood. His good looks and ‘friendliness’, the quality that people singled out as the key to his appeal, enabled him to drift with apparent inevitability to the ...”

“... wit, cerebral depth and a marvellous turn of phrase. But reductionism of this sort won’t do, as Richard Bourke shows in his erudite and compelling study of Burke’s political life. Burke’s earliest works, before his engagement to the Rockingham Whigs, were concerned with fundamental questions in political philosophy and aesthetics. The Tory ...”

“... at the end of his Wars of the Roses tetralogy: while Henry VII may have been as murderous as Richard III, he was nothing like as charming. Francis Bacon was ready to praise Henry’s politic wisdom in the 1622 biography that was to frame perceptions of the king until late in the 20th century, but he could not disguise the price of Henry’s determination ...”

“... to the British Empire and the Atlantic slave trade. ‘Fatima’s Poem’ is addressed to Richard Pennant, 1st Baron Penrhyn (1737-1808), and was inspired by a visit to Penrhyn Castle, one of eleven National Trust houses involved in the project. Pennant’s family owned four sugar plantations in Jamaica and he used some of the profits to develop the ...”

“... a Manichean or Franco-ite anti-Communism to inform him, and Vorster and Verwoerd had the dream of white Christian destiny, and the Greek colonels the rather more insipid rhetoric of ‘Greece for Christian Greeks’, the decay of outright fascist systems was quite a rapid and complete one – much more rapid and complete than Nicos Poulantzas, for ...”

“... called Animal, a dog called Badger, a man called Ratty, and Swampy digging his famous tunnel. A white Rasta is cleaning dishes with the ashes of a cooking fire. Someone passes round a peacepipe filled with motherwort and hash. Rats gnaw through sleeping bags and rucksacks. A mother wipes snot off her child’s face with her sleeve. ‘Great ...”

“... Mackenzie are in the foreground, far more important to him than the club-like asseverations of Richard Benson and the other Southern bores with whom he has to endure his summer holidays. The mysteries of fishing – which are not only mysteries but skills – come better from Alec than they do from such prim experts as Bobby Paton (‘Fishing with the fly ...”

“... In another story from Where I Live Now, Berlin’s most recent collection, the narrator is a young white male en route from the city to the county jail: After a long climb you come to a valley in the hills. The land used to be the summer estate of a millionaire called Spreckles. The fields around the county jail are like the grounds of a French castle. That ...”

“... police. In 1999, the year the report was published, black people were six times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched. In 2008, they were seven times more likely to be stopped and searched, and in 2017 eight times more likely. Despite these statistics the Met commissioner, Cressida Dick, recently defended a fourfold increase in the use of ...”

“... the how. Greta’s opinions are dependably unwoke. She quips that her dog’s fur has turned white from seeing ‘the souls of dead slaves’. She assumes that her landlady’s adopted Nicaraguan son is the gardener and talks to him ‘like a dog’ (a ‘bad habit’, she allows). She refers to bees as ‘Japanesey’ for their ‘kamikaze’ habit of ...”

“... may consider every cloud a lakeTransmogrified, its character unselfed,At once a whale and a white wedding cakeBellowed into conspicuous ectoplasm.It is a lake’s ghost that goes voyaging.The book received measured but disappointing reviews (‘many of the poems have very little content, emotional or otherwise’; ‘all is craftsmanship held up for our ...”