“... find this sort of avoidance common. Also, the narrative stops at around the millennium, short of Bush, Iraq, 9/11, the war on terror. This gives it a peculiar time-lapse quality, as noticeable in its pop references as in its thoughts on bombs and bombing: who, since the massive record release and tour of 2004, could now think of Smile as ‘lost’? An even ...”

“... the Great Tradition, texts as unlike each other, and as unlike Emma, as Pilgrim’s Progress and W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions. No one’s arguing about Emma. But Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegorical dream-vision; while Green Mansions (a story set in the forests of western Guyana featuring a female spirit-presence, a lost tribe, and enough ...”

“... Fidel Castro, but Cuba was isolated, having lost its Soviet Bloc trading partners. By June 1990, Bush père could claim that a ‘rising tide of democracy, never before witnessed in this beloved hemisphere’ would soon make possible a ‘free trade zone stretching from the port of Anchorage to Tierra del Fuego’. Latin America’s conversion to free trade ...”

“... helping the Iraqi people obtain clean water, reliable electricity or competent healthcare.’ The Bush administration has decided to provide no more reconstruction funds. The auditors who have discovered Iraq’s deepening financial crisis have been ignored. They asked the US ambassador and the US military commander in Iraq for their views. Neither ...”

“... to himself all credit for any success achieved under his command. I expected, therefore, when we sat down after dinner, to be both bored and embarrassed, and perhaps at length. And, indeed, the speaker did at once begin by talking about himself. But after a short time I found that I was seized with silent laughter. Why, I wondered, had no one ever said ...”

“... Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, New York, Porter lost his stirrups when his horse spooked at a bush and fell on him, crushing both his legs. He gave his crippled legs nicknames: ‘Josephine’ was the obliging left one; the right, ‘Geraldine’, ‘a hellion, a bitch a psychopath’, was amputated mid-thigh in 1958. The accident was defining of ...”

“... accountable is Housman’s humour, and how it can constitute a kind of undercover language, or bush telegraph. Humour is a product of the involuntary, and seems to go with the things that came into his head, even when these have his most memorable kinds of beauty. From far, from eve and morning       And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to ...”

“... or at least a cosmic melodrama – to give them real meaning, and intimations of ultimate victory. George W. Bush’s policy after September 2001 ‘has been closely shaped by the memory of the Iron Curtain’, Wright maintains, while its legacy has helped liberals and ex-Marxists to switch a ‘polarising habit of thought ...”

“... in Britain and who died, unsung, in exile. In trying to understand the historical Mackintosh, we have to deal both with the commercialisation of his legacy – the ‘Mockin’tosh’, as Murray Grigor termed it, that fills the shops – and the tendency to see him as a lone figure instead of a man who, like all great artists, did not just borrow but ...”

“... Murray types his poems with a crooked finger, broken in a childhood struggle with his cousin George. As Murray’s depressed mother suffered successive miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy, she grew increasingly stern towards her only son, who was sent to live in a boarding house at Taree, New South Wales, where he went to secondary school. He was there ...”

“... what is it about starting a website that makes people think they have a lot in common with George Washington? – is now a not very funny comic wine columnist. Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge is a period novel about Silicon Alley. Pynchon is fond of silly names, and in the dotcom bubble they seemed to be ...”

“... corporate democracy’. This revolt against the era and ethos of the CBCs (Bill Clinton, Blair, Bush Jr, Brown, Cameron and Hillary Clinton) offered the giddy prospect of ‘a jailbreak from the old order’, filling its supporters with ‘energy and glee’. Barnett respects ‘the audacity of those I know who voted to Leave. They are not racists, they are ...”

“... to Fanny Burney. She was swept, as Second Keeper of the Robes, into the train of Queen Charlotte, George III’s wife, when she too was in her thirties and famous as the author of two bestsellers, Cecilia and her rumbustious, read-on first novel, Evelina, which Oxford has now reissued as a World’s Classics paperback. The potential for psychological delicacy ...”

“... else. The Obama speech is political convention boilerplate, the usual feelgood-God-bless-America-we’re-the-greatest, with hammer and anvil parallelisms, antitheses, and the occasional chiasmus for spice. Obama gives it a multicultural twist, reprising the now famous story of his mixed-race background, modest upbringing and unlikely rise to the top of the ...”

“... We are​ in the African bush, at night, in the mid-1950s. At a campfire Father Tassin, a Jesuit palaeontologist, is questioning Saint-Denis, the French colonial administrator of this corner of Chad. Tassin is looking for information about a mysterious figure called Morel, whose recent activities have scandalised all of French Equatorial Africa ...”