“... we have not seen the emergence of Trumpist oligarchs. What we do see are Trumpist enablers, the Paul Ryans and Mitch McConnells who have been happy to push through deregulation measures and massive tax cuts for the upper echelons. These enablers have set about realising Steve Bannon’s goal of ‘deconstructing the administrative state’, in effect ...”

“... out in the cold. In ‘Wooden Ships’, a post-nuclear daydream, the singers – Grace Slick and Paul Kantner – are sailing away from America, exchanging iodine tablets with other survivors and looking back at figures on the shoreline moving around in silver hazmat suits. ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, a travesty of the national anthem performed on a ...”

“... in Asia and Africa, but it would not have dreamed of intervening unilaterally in Europe or North America. Despite spending more on the military than the rest of the world combined, and despite enjoying overwhelming technological superiority, American military power is actually quite limited. As Iraq – and to a lesser extent Afghanistan – has ...”

“... his Texas ranch, and gives nicknames to the members of his cabinet. (‘Pablo’ for the hapless Paul O’Neill; ‘Z-Man’ for Robert Zoellick.) George Washington, on the other hand, was so aloof that even his contemporaries tried to make light of the fact. According to one story, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Alexander Hamilton ...”

“... the following lines from ‘Algerian Diary’, dated ‘New Year’s Day 1944’ and set in the North African POW camp where Sereni was imprisoned: Over there where from tower to tower agreement leaps in vain now and is thrown back, the who-goes-there of the hour, – just as down here from turret to turret from the heights of the compound Moroccan guards ...”

“... more eye-catching than that left behind him by ‘Thompson of Sunderland’, a vandal out of the North who had scrawled his name and address on Pompey’s column in Alexandria in letters that Flaubert claims could be read ‘a quarter of a league away’. More significantly stupid than Thompson of Sunderland, however, was Auguste Comte, one of whose books ...”

“... have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’. Thus Paul Berman, a frequent contributor to Dissent, the New Yorker and other liberal journals, and until now better known as a commentator on American cultural affairs, recycled himself as an expert on Islamic fascism (itself a new term of art), publishing Terror and ...”

“... hinder the growth of that affection. In 1890, Stan Laurel was born in Yorkshire to a girl from the North Riding and a man who made his own greasepaints. But Stan’s father, Arthur Jefferson, did more than that: he was a theatrical entrepreneur and a writer of plays and sketches. Stan grew up in the theatre, making his first stage appearance at the Glasgow ...”

“... you read over the work it’s clear that St Lucia was always a presence even when Walcott was in North America and Europe. He came home when he reached his eighties, and he’s unlikely to leave again except on short trips (the Globe will stage Omeros next month and maybe he’ll get to London). It’s odd, in a world fizzing with insects and furious ...”

“... half-Jewish background and made her only foray into political journalism in order to rebuke Pope Paul VI for being tactless to Golda Meir. ‘All the more since I discovered myself to be a Catholic animal,’ she wrote in 1963, ‘am I a Gentile Jewess.’ When Spark was starting out, in the late 1940s, she was determined to avoid the ‘slop and ...”

“... Here she distinguished herself from her contemporaries: poets like Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Paul Blackburn often harked back to fraternal tropes of the knight, troubadour, jongleur. Never king. Guest’s origins were anything but kingly: born in North Carolina in 1920, she was shuffled around from town to town in ...”

“... the Company created a sizeable territorial state, first in eastern and southern India, then in the north and west. The morality of what was being done was under challenge, however. Indian rulers and other elites often directed sarcastic barbs at Company Bahadur (or the Honourable Company), that rapacious warlord masquerading as a merchant. In Britain, the ...”

“... adventure (they had known each other three months, we had known each other nine).’ Jane and Paul Bowles are always on the move – so are she and John. Zelda and Virginia Woolf had debilitating periods and headaches – she does, too. How far can she go? In one scene, she looks at Simone Weil. ‘I am Simone Weil,’ she declares, ‘although Simone ...”

“... doubt because the combination of glass façades and inadequate underfloor heating meant that the north side of the building froze while the south was like a hothouse. A difference in temperature of as much as 30ºC from one side to the other not only made it unpleasant to inhabit, it had the effect, as Pevsner pointed out, of warping the structural metal ...”

“... new marble monument ‘to the victims of terrorism, 1968-2007’ in Plaza Angel González, in the north-west of the city. The victims of ETA and Islamic extremism can be remembered, but not the victims of the Spanish government. Nearby, some anti-fascist graffiti had been daubed over with the legend ‘Crew 38’, a neo-Nazi sign in yellow and red, alongside ...”