“... in one of his late poems.In Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, his most celebrated poem (John Berger and Anna Bostock’s reissued translation omits the first three words of the title), Césaire is unsparing about Martinique. The Antillean islands are ‘pitted with smallpox’ and ‘dynamited by alcohol’. His home town is ‘inert’ and ...”

“... London – to which superstar American CEOs were lured with the promise of an audience with Elton John and the king in St Paul’s Cathedral (proof, apparently, that Britain is ‘open for business’, or more plausibly that desperate times call for desperate measures) – Starmer switched to a clumsier metaphor. ‘We are in the business of building on our ...”

“... back out into space. The existence of the effect was first posited in 1859 by the Irish scientist John Tyndall, who said that without the greenhouse effect ‘the warmth of our fields and gardens would pour itself unrequited into space, and the sun would rise upon an island held fast in the iron grip of frost’. The Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius added to ...”

“... renamed himself after a character on the 1970s television comedy The Brady Bunch. A graduate of Brown and a Rhodes scholar, he cut state funding for higher education by 80 per cent and instituted a law allowing the teaching of Creationism in science classes. Although Louisiana is one of the poorest states, Jindal remained firm in his opposition to ...”

“... believe that Burnham, Cooper or Kendall offered a better chance of electoral success in 2020 than Brown managed in 2010 or Ed Miliband did earlier this year. Indeed they didn’t believe that, in a changing political landscape, their man necessarily stood a worse chance in 2020 than Burnham, Cooper or Kendall would have. They were not, as Freedland ...”

“... on, in 1760, he painted William Brooke, four times Mayor of Doncaster: a mercer dressed in good brown velvet with a great belly swelling above spread knees, and arms akimbo. This pose of the fat man of authority (it is similar to the one Ingres put M. Bertin the banker in) would be used again in the portrait of Richard Arkwright. Miss Cracroft from the same ...”

“... the terminal rim, I would hesitate to take bets that resurrection is ruled out. Thirty years ago John Updike gave us in Rabbit Run Harold ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, the basketball-player lately wed to tippling slatternly Janice Springer, who failed to cope. When baby Becky drowns through the negligence of Janice, Rabbit runs away. In Rabbit Redux, the title ...”

“... too. Greetings, borrowers. What I admire – not the word – about the poems is their intensity. John Berryman once said: write as short as you can, in order, of what matters. Surely no one – least of all Berryman himself – can have fulfilled the terms of that prescription as scrupulously as Hamilton. The majority of the poems are generated by one of two ...”

“... cold. Pepys looked at the megaliths in 1668 and shrugged: ‘God knows what their use was.’ John Aubrey, the first person to make a serious study of stone circles, put his finger on the problem: ‘These Antiquities are so exceeding old that no Bookes doe reach them.’ He developed a more effective method. Using measurements and comparative surveys of ...”

“... such as Bussy Queen, Drag Detective, JackFed, GreenGay and the Season 9 contestant Nina Bo’nina Brown. I was supposed to be writing a novel, but as Gia Gunn once said on All Stars: ‘What you wanna do, isn’t necessarily what you’re gonna do.’If Season 1 had arrived in 2000 I might have watched it from the beginning, alongside Big Brother and Channel ...”

“... presented a novelty of a still more dangerous sort, according to the dramatist and man of letters John Dennis. Heretics misconstrued religion, but did not set out to overturn the moral order. Mandeville, however, presented himself as ‘a serious, a cool, a deliberate champion’ of vice and luxury; a new kind of intellectual renegade such as ‘has never ...”

“... to shield him from the charge of being a closet republican, or a classical republican like John Toland. He believes in a ‘legal limited monarchy’, and has a humane idea of consensus and national unity within such an arrangement. He is an active, adept pragmatist, a revolutionary moderate. In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe speaks of Crusoe’s ‘life of ...”

“... who was then 73, was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst once described by the New York Times as ‘John Wayne in a blue suit’. He taught at Columbia and had co-authored a book about the usefulness of the interview in clinical situations. Didion was 66. She wasn’t seeing MacKinnon under duress: her daughter, Quintana, who was an alcoholic, had told her own ...”

“... where they arrived at around 12.30 to find Knox, a pretty blonde girl, and Sollecito – tall, brown-haired, with glasses – loitering outside. Barbie Nadeau, the author of Angel Face: The True Story of Student Killer Amanda Knox (2010), says that they had a mop and bucket with them. In fact, Knox had taken a mop round to Sollecito’s apartment that ...”

“... of the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. Senator Kerry believes (though Senator Brown does not always agree) that his investigation was deliberately and continually impeded by the Bush Administration. The close proximity of Bush to Irangate and now to Iraqgate makes that seem very likely. For British readers, however, the Senator’s report ...”