“... 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 ...”

“... for clemency awaited his decision. Among the applicants, it is reported, were Conrad Black; Michael Milken, of junk bond fame; John Walker Lindh, the ‘American Taliban’; a former Republican congressman jailed for accepting bribes; and a former Democratic governor of Louisiana, convicted on racketeering charges. They were doomed to ...”

“... aforesaid Nicholas is charged, before us at Westminster on Saturday next after eight days of Saint Michael, to undergo and receive whatever our court should then and there happen to order concerning him in this behalf, and this in no wise omit, upon the peril that may befall, and have there this writ. Witness, Sir John Popham, at Westminster, the eleventh day ...”

“... unit. Some of the stories obtained this way were trivial, though intrusive: George Michael wept in his jail cell, for example, or a male British Airways worker secretly wore high heels. Others were more serious: security lapses at Heathrow, or equipment shortages in Afghanistan. Almost anything could be obtained if the offer was big enough: in ...”

“... in the country’s history, contested by two sons of the light-skinned post-independence elite: Michael Manley, the leader of the social democratic People’s National Party, and Edward Seaga, the leader of the conservative Jamaica Labour Party. The Jamaican system of ‘garrisons’ – social housing estates, usually built over bulldozed shantytowns, run ...”

“... electrons orbiting a central nucleus – summons up both a theory of atomic structure and the powers of nuclear energy. The periodic table made visible ideas of the connection between atomic weight and the periodicity of chemical properties. Watson and Crick took one look at the first jerry-rigged workshop model of double-helical DNA and they saw how the ...”

“... don’t think that’s plausible.’ Senior American generals, including Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency between 2012 and 2014, had been warning the Obama administration for some time that allowing jihadis to topple Assad would have dire consequences.* Apparently hoping that this line had gained traction in ...”

“... on the incoming secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and Trump’s now ex-national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The rhetoric emanating from US politicians and media commentators too seems to be drawn from another era. In November, a murky online group called PropOrNot went full McCarthy by releasing ‘The List’, designed to name and shame – or indeed ...”

“... In the end the Church committee found no smoking assassins’ guns but, as Hersh says, the powers that be employed ‘lots of euphemisms – “who will rid me of this troublesome priest?” kind of stuff’. Ultimately the Church investigation did not have the impact on public policy Hersh had hoped for. ‘The CIA,’ he writes, ‘is still doing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Perhaps the real test of an anthology is whether it convincingly brings fresh material forward. Michael Harper, Dave Smith, Albert Goldbarth: Vendler takes risks at the Contemporary end of her Book, and mostly carries them off. Though one looks in vain for Hass or Dulpen, there is much to please, including a clutch of decorously unfeminist women. Louise ...”

“... the names tend to be. Fielding’s Shamela makes Richardson’s Pamela a sham. The name Austin Powers suggests that his prototype James Bond is really just a crappy English car fitted with a turbocharger, while his enemy Dr Evil is, well, too silly even to discuss. The spoof fairy-tale romance The Princess Bride has a heroine who defies convention by being ...”

“... vote. They did this in part by adapting the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Michael Heilperin, a founding member of Mont Pelerin, wrote the ICC’s International Code to Protect Foreign Investments, which enshrined the ‘preferential’ standing of foreign investors over the host state. Neoliberals, in other words, deftly promoted the ...”