“... wife, what a terrific president he’s been for most of his first 16 months in office. Modesty may not be among his many virtues, but then ‘no one in this town is modest,’ and he is, as he constantly reminds people, the president of the United States of America. As the novel opens, he’s really up against it. The time is more or less now – or, to be ...”

“... to his wife ‘by water to Buenos Aires, then westward overland for hundreds of leagues’. This may place him in Di Benedetto’s Mendoza. The time isn’t quite right, though. Don Diego is living in the last years of the 18th century. Of course he doesn’t know, as the author and the reader do, that the very empire that is meant to control Don Diego’s ...”

“... looking for a place to inject, or homeless people wanting shelter, or gay men meeting for sex – may use a park’s toilets as well as middle-class mothers. ‘Providing bathrooms means welcoming the world,’ Lowe writes. But ‘keeping some out is most easily achieved by keeping everyone out.’ The book flits between historical accounts of the rise and ...”

“... scrunching their way through riverside alder and willow in Perth city centre, for example. In May 2019, the Scottish government recognised beavers as a protected species, meaning that any farmer seeking to control numbers has to apply for a NatureScot licence. The old guard used this legislation to fight back: 87 animals had been shot under licence before ...”

“... too, Kurdish leaders worry that they are over-extended and too reliant on the Americans, who may stop supporting them diplomatically and militarily once Raqqa and the last IS strongholds have fallen. Turkish intervention is one threat; another is the Syrian army, which – with Russian air cover – has surrounded IS at Deir Ezzor and will now want to ...”

“... quite like that. There’s suffering here, but it’s subtler and more complicated than readers may expect.If Rainbow Milk is about sex, it’s also about work – that most millennial of subjects. After Jesse is ‘disfellowshipped’ by the Brothers, he goes full-time at McDonald’s. When he runs away from Wolverhampton, he feels a stab of guilt at ...”

“... heated debate because another Ferdinand Marcos, his son and namesake, was elected president last May, winning almost 59 per cent of the vote. He seems to have succeeded in creating a new narrative about his father’s rule and downfall. In February 1986, more than a million Filipinos gathered on a stretch of Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA), which runs ...”

“... Aquitaine famously accompanied her first husband, Louis VII of France, on the Second Crusade and may have participated in negotiations between him and her uncle, Raymond of Antioch. Much later, as queen of England, she represented her son Richard I while he was on the Third Crusade. At a humbler rank, the Cistercian monk Thomas of Froidmont wrote a Life of ...”

“... for ‘no reading is, or should desire to be, innocent of political involvement.’Lentricchia may here have reached one of those limits with which, on Fish’s view, every theory eventually collides: for to learn a whole new set of terms and assumptions only to discover that by doing so your text ends up where every poem, indeed every piece of ...”

“... his ambiguous relation to the old order and blamed for the killing in the Reef, no matter how it may have started. This makes him a dangerous man for Mandela to talk to. Buthelezi is the enemy: but Mandela has already made crucial concessions to ‘the enemy’ – a different one but the two are quickly conflated – above all, by suspending the armed ...”

“... compensate. Some readers, who harbour quite similar feelings about the present prime minister, may be surprised by the closing chapters of this book, in which she emerges as on the whole an admirable figure with some venial shortcomings, such as a lack of concern for the arts. She was, we gather, much needed. Britain was, in 1979, even more evidently in ...”

“... accreditation. Within weeks of the break-up, she was covering the Battle of the Bulge and by May 1945 she had written one of her finest reports – on Dachau. She would mull over the question of Nazi atrocities in two more reports, one from Nuremberg in 1946 and another, published here, on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, 16 years later. Spare and ...”

“... the Labour Party do their work for them.’ This analysis led him to a startling prediction. On 11 May 1975, he wrote: ‘A coalition has been born without being formally declared: it is broadly the Tories and Liberals throwing their weight behind Callaghan, I think. They won’t touch Wilson. They’ll get rid of him just as they got rid of Heath ... I ...”

“... chapter on the newspaper Libération, started in 1973 to be the ‘voice’ of the generation of May ’68, but no fuller analysis of the modern French press or of its literary connections. To get any sense of the modern literary marketplace we have to wait indeed for the New History’s brutally downputting last chapter, by Stephen Heath, who picks on ...”

“... remarked that in doing so they displayed passivity and a lack of readiness to do battle. That may be, but there is a more conspiratorial explanation – and such explanations cannot be dismissed easily in Russia – which is that the authorities were pulling the demonstrators onto the punch. The march reached the White House in mid-afternoon. So swift was ...”