“... writings entitled The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson, but – full disclosure – I omitted to read the work under review.)Looking at those writings now, I would say it was beyond dispute that Johnson has turned out to be the most influential satirist of his generation. People who complain that there’s no right-wing satire in this country should forget ...”

“... to London, Magee played Mr Slocum in that same first production of All That Fall, directed by Donald McWhinnie, in which Jack MacGowran had taken part. It was hearing this voice faintly in France through the ether as broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in December 1957 – reading an extract from Molloy and From an Abandoned Work, also directed by ...”

“... no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate agent Roy Brooks that my brother read aloud (‘The décor is revolting … rain drips sadly onto the oilcloth … sacrifice £3500’). As Jeremy Lewis observes, it was a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its ...”

“... provides testimony which brings out its susceptibility to romantic and dualistic interpretation. Donald Davie has written lately in this journal: ‘Great poetry is greatly sane, greatly lucid; and insanity is as much a calamity for poets and for poetry as for other human beings and other sorts of human business.’ These are impressive words. But of course ...”

“... of him, because he threatens them, and they know what they gave him.’ Mr Karimi had seen Donald Rumsfeld on television a few days before, demonising Saddam. ‘It was different in 1983,’ he said. ‘That was when Rumsfeld went to Baghdad and told Saddam that President Reagan wanted to strengthen military, technical and commercial ties.’ Later ...”

“... avant-garde. Fuzzy political gestures lacking any real slog or engagement. Buzzword slogans that read like Mao Zedong subbed by Patience Strong. Many of the artworld ideas Ono traded in (or on) were secondhand, watered down, and very much reliant on the ossified gallery system for any spark they did generate. Whereas the Beatles stood on stage and made ...”

“... songs of peace to all his neighbours:God shall be truly known; and those about herFrom her shall read the perfect ways of honour,And by those claim their greatness, not by blood.It isn’t clear that these lines were intended as a wholehearted endorsement of nostalgia for the old queen and her times. Only a decade after her funeral, there may have been as ...”

“... free, male and female within families – is the most unified of the slice books. It could well be read beside The Fatal Shore, complementing Robert Hughes’s information on convict life, extending the colonial landscapes, and importantly correcting Hughes’s simplistic view of the Aborigines.* When everything has been said about the ordeals of the ...”

“... What is the reward for knowing the worst?Donald Barthelme, Snow WhiteWhen Richard Rorty​ wrote, in one of his many familiar pragmatist pronouncements, that the only way you can tell if something is true is if it helps you get the life you want, it sounded either like a provocative assertion or another advertisement, masquerading as epistemology, for consumer capitalism ...”

“... mid-1950s against anything even faintly obscene, a campaign that among other cases saw the artist Donald McGill, king of the seaside postcard, briefly banged up for his depiction of an outsize, almost vertical stick of rock’. How far this prudishness in the public culture was mirrored in private life is hard to gauge, but Kynaston presents enough evidence ...”

“... now making their way to North America and Europe. In selling his wall on the border with Mexico, Donald Trump likes to say: ‘Ask Israel, the wall works.’ Camps are bulldozed in Calais, thousands of people drown in the Mediterranean, and the Australian government detains survivors of wars and despotic regimes in camps on the remote islands of Nauru and ...”

“... Just before the 2024 US presidential election, Rogan put out a supine three-hour interview with Donald Trump, who delivered his usual portion of lies, idiocies and bluster. Six years earlier, one of Rogan’s guests had been Penrose. The tweedily attired scientist didn’t patronise and the sweatshirted interviewer was duly star-struck: ‘I’m a big fan ...”

“... Haiti in spite of many assurances from the IDB. Even so it was not until last month that one could read in a US daily newspaper that the aid freeze might have contributed to the overthrow of the penniless Haitian government. On 7 March, the Boston Globe wrote: Today, Haiti’s government, which serves eight million people, has an annual budget of about $300 ...”

“... of murder’. Auden had further reasons to rebuke himself. The final lines of ‘Spain, 1937’ read: ‘History to the defeated/May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.’ In a foreword to the 1966 edition of his Collected Shorter Poems, Auden wrote: ‘To say this is to equate goodness with success. It would have been bad enough if I had ever held this ...”

“... said, ‘are like young girls and roses; they last as long as they last.’ More than a hint of Donald Trump in all this. He actually wanted World War Two to go on longer, so that the rapidly growing Free French forces could earn a greater share of the glory. The sacred egoism of the nation was all that mattered, and what sustained it was a triple link ...”