“... 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 ...”

“... Its precursor, air force space command, was set up in 1982. In 2001, a commission chaired by Donald Rumsfeld concluded that it was being neglected, and recommended setting up a separate ‘military department for space’, something that has remained a goal of American generals ever since. But even some military space enthusiasts thought the 2019 ...”

“... on 6 March killed around 140 HTS personnel. They seem to have believed the misinformation they’d read online, that other countries were about to intervene. The next day, government reinforcements arrived in large numbers. Ali disappeared into a quieter part of the city. Suliman had no urge to pick up a weapon again, not even in defence, and stayed indoors ...”

“... passing that invite further reflection. For example, we learn that the Medea was the most widely read of the plays of Euripides in the 18th century, and we may well wonder how a ‘feminist’ drama was interpreted or used in teaching. In the same period, politically radical students refused to powder their wigs, and the significance of this as a symbol of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... you from serving on a jury, without explanation. If you try to get a job, you’re likely to read in the employer’s advertisement a warning that felons are not welcome; this is perfectly legal. This cycle of punishment, shaming and exclusion all adds up to a more or less permanent condition of internal exile – what Orlando Patterson, in his 1982 book ...”

“... and plays, to the monumental Princeton University Press Coleridge. Coleridge’s verse can now be read in full, and in a form worthy of his best writing. The poems are beautifully presented; the brief preliminary introduction to each is sensible, as is the annotation at the foot of the page, and the bibliographical commentary that closes the volumes. This is ...”

“... interpret these things. We are also familiar with the idea, developed powerfully in philosophy by Donald Davidson, that we could not come to understand these people without building into our interpretation at a structural level some assumptions about the ways in which their experience and thoughts resemble ours: that we must interpret what they say, for ...”

“... in 1932, A Novelette and Other Prose by William Carlos Williams, and two books by Pound: How to Read and The Spirit of Romance. It was while the Oppens were in Europe that the word ‘Objectivist’ came into existence. Pound had foisted Zukofsky on Harriet Monroe as a guest editor of Poetry for an issue which appeared in February 1931. Carl Rakosi, another ...”

“... to work, have fun, and live safely. I peered through the glass entrance doors. Another poster read connected through joy. A quizzical security guard wandered towards me. I hadn’t told Mondelez I was coming. I made myself scarce.Just behind the factory, the remains of the old runway are still there. Driving along the road on the far side of the plant you ...”

“... yet you do not want to be destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable. We want to confess ourselves in writing to a few friends, and we do not always want to feel that no one but those friends will ever read what we have written.Eliot’s considerable correspondence with ...”

“... the entry code. It’s as if you’ve been shoved onstage, without lines, in a play you’ve never read. Smile brightly. Bluff like a politician in a glass booth being manipulated by semaphoring black-suited attendants with clipboards. So? ‘All for the best in the best of all possible Londons,’ says the mayor, says the minister, says Joanna Lumley. ‘All ...”

“... leadership in Hungary, the judiciary and media have been neutered, while in his second term Donald Trump is trying to undermine the functions of the US state by wilfully flouting the law. Far-right populist movements are usually built around conspiracist demagogues who promise to remove rights from minority groups and whose supporters trade in ...”

“... June, the sixth day of Israel’s attack on Iran, David Petraeus gave some unsolicited advice to Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him to dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment programme or face ‘the complete destruction of your country and your regime and ...”

“... of Mao, Deng and Jiang. The American sinologist Orville Schell, who accompanied both Joe Biden and Donald Trump to meetings with Xi, said he had ‘encountered few leaders whose body language and facial expressions reveal so little’.If Xi lacks the vivid individuality of Deng or Jiang, it is not for reasons of self-concealment. Within China his personal ...”