“... Labour found difficult to grasp. Corbyn spelled it out himself in one of the TV debates: We also as a party have to face up to something which is an unpleasant truth, that we fought the 2015 election on very good policies included in the manifesto but fundamentally we were going ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sheena and I weren’t like that, but then I don’t remember going to many parties. Instead, we drove around Scotland, and went to a lot of plays – my first piece in the LRB was about seeing Happy Days with her at the National. ‘In as much as I thought I could know someone, I thought I knew her,’ I’d say, though when I Google her now, I still ...”

“... are deployed in almost every country in the world. The point of covert action, of course, is that we’re supposed to know very little about it. But here the system falls down, since even secret operatives can’t help the occasional boast. After every famous mission – an assassination, a ‘rescue’, a counterinsurgency strike – former special forces ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The question of how we are to take Iris Murdoch’s characters (indeed, whether we can take them at all) is raised, even before we get to know them, by their names. In The Green Knight we have to contend with Lucas and Clement Graffe, Harvey Blacket, Bellamy James and his dog Anax, the Anderson women – Louise and her daughters Alethea (Aleph), Sophia (Sefton) and Moira (Moy) – Emil and Clive and the Adwardens ...”

“... Braun) who drooled over her ‘personality compulsion, something of the Führer Kontakt’. And it George Younger, then Secretary of State for Scotland, who remarked of her post-Falklands address to the Scottish Conservative Party in 1982, that it reminded him of ‘the Nuremberg rally’. Countries which believe themselves to be in a mess are easily attracted ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a passing reference in early accounts of the colony to a convict stage production. The play was George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer and the occasion the King’s birthday, 1789. Apparently, the convicts’ efforts to please ‘were not unattended with applause’. It is a queer little episode. The honoured king was mad. Europe itself was a little mad ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”