“... the stern rose in the water, four great propellers could be clearly discerned. Then she was gone. George Henderson was only six at the time. ‘I can still sit here now,’ he told a TV crew in 1994, ‘and see that great liner just sliding below the waves.’ The Lusitania, launched by Cunard in June 1906 to wrest transatlantic traffic back from the ...”

“... in Boston. Earlier books had revealed that Kennedy took a number of different medications, and we were vaguely aware at the time that he had a bad back, but Dallek’s new information about the extent of Kennedy’s health problems is astonishing. He does not treat the matter salaciously: how Kennedy dealt with his poor health becomes evidence of his ...”

“... between them when they see me peeking in wistfully at the window. One has to slink away into tall bush at back of the yard, then somehow freshen up with the garden hose. Reminds me, like so many things, of my sad childhood – one much worse than Sonia Sotomayor’s. And yes, it’s undeniable: packing up several decades’ worth of precious tat at the old ...”

“... or been a more fluent speaker; if Howard had offered Cameron the shadow chancellorship or George Osborne had not accepted it – if these or any number of other contingencies had been otherwise, Cameron might not have become leader. Yet he has been perceived as an unstoppable force, the author of an irreversible transformation in his party that has ...”

“... about post-Enlightenment man. By the early 20th century the aggressive bourgeois ego which George Santayana saw emerge in the industrialising US – the go-getting American with no higher aim than diligent imitation of the rich – was already under siege in Europe by oversized and complex political and economic systems. Sociologists had identified ...”

“... in wait For what I should, yet never can, remember: No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush Of Lad’s-love, or Old Man, no child beside, Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate; Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end. (‘Old Man’) It is odd, as John Bayley noted in an essay two decades ago, how frequently the poetry conveys its most ...”

“... either). Liberals misread Trump’s talk of unity and unification since winning the election ( ‘We will unite and we will win, win, win!’ he tweeted on 12 November) if they imagine it as conciliatory. Unity is possible only on the populist’s own terms; since nobody else can truly speak for the people, dissent and ...”

“... a narrative effect, the insertion of a later perspective (real or imagined) into an earlier one. We may be a little surprised to see Iris Murdoch playing with the Russian Formalists’ distinction of story and plot (fabula and syuzhet, events in their chronological order and events in the order of their arrangement). Or even to see her playing at all. But ...”

“... skin is a shade darker than midnight). According to Selvon’s friend, the Barbadian novelist George Lamming (who died last month), Selvon was ‘a master at the contracted phrase “niggergram”, meaning the circulation of rumour at top speed. There can hardly be another writer who has contributed in this way to the vocabulary of West Indian ...”

“... economic experiments suggested by eminent thinkers of Africa and the Caribbean, from C.L.R. James, George Padmore and Eric Williams of Trinidad, to Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Michael Manley of Jamaica. The New International Economic Order (NIEO) called for and the 1974 charter of economic rights put forward by the UN General ...”

“... enthusiast who blew himself up while stalking his ex-girlfriend. There was her near neighbour, George Waterfield Russell Jr, aka the Eastside Killer, who was apprenticing as a prowler and peeping Tom during the same period, before killing and mutilating three young women in 1990. Fraser has a personal stake, in other words, in solving the conundrum. She ...”

“... shown its hand.Now that its existence, nature and power have been proved to us, why shouldn’t we believe that the members of this group arranged 9/11? Or that Bill Gates is planning to kill us with vaccines, or inject us with nanochips hidden in vaccines, or both? Why shouldn’t the entire course of world events have been planned by a group of elite ...”

“... its title. Not many readers will get the allusion here to Tocqueville and Beaumont in America by George Wilson Pierson, published in 1938 and for a long time the standard account of the nine-month journey which Tocqueville undertook with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, ostensibly for the purpose of writing a report on the American prison system, but which ...”

“... Vietnam era, the other marking the transition between the end of the Cold War and the unveiling of George Bush’s ‘new world order’. Both events were also turning points in the history of American television, reaching unprecedented numbers of viewers. According to Major-General Perry Smith in How CNN fought the war, CNN’s public relations office ...”

“... dominates the first chapter of The Arch-Poet much as Purgatory gives focus to its ending. Again we are presented with an Old Man and a young. They meet beneath another bare tree, where the water of immortality sometimes bubbles up. The Old Man has been waiting to drink for more than half a century, but is always distracted from the prize by a woman of the ...”