“... a long sequence of racially aggravated land grabs ending in the 1670s with the decisive trauma of King Philip’s War. Prisoners were enslaved, though Africans were thought to be better workers and were available in bulk. New Englanders were not avid slaveowners, but they supplied the horses, timber and food that allowed Caribbean plantations to specialise in ...”

“... of copies were printed and distributed to teenagers across the country (at almost the same time, Michael Gove was sending copies of the King James Bible, with a foreword by himself, to every school in England). The government also passed a law allowing it to appoint judges even if the opposition disagreed, and seven judges ...”

“... which needless to say never got written. Firbank rather than Wilde. Geoffrey played Warren, the king’s doctor, in the film The Madness of King George, with Cyril Shaps as Pepys, who set great store by the king’s motions. ‘Oh the stool, the stool,’ said Warren. ‘My dear ...”

“... to understand the person’s features in motion over time. That hadn’t always been the case. Michael Wishart, the son of Freud’s lover Lorna Wishart, said that when Freud was young, you couldn’t blink while he was painting your thumb or he became ‘distressed’. The majority of Freud’s prints, made three and a half decades later, were part of a ...”

“... Middle East was awash in ‘cheap credit for leveraged buyouts’. Naqvi, the ‘Gulf’s Buyout King’, hobnobbed with presidents, prime ministers and business celebrities, and spoke at investment conferences held by the UN, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. His firm raised billions from investors, including development finance agencies like the ...”

“... Jamahiriyya, has ended badly. In contrast to the bloodless coup of 1 September 1969 that overthrew King Idris and brought Gaddafi and his colleagues to power, the combined rebellion/civil war/ Nato bombing campaign to protect civilians has occasioned several thousand (5000? 10,000? 25,000?) deaths, many thousands of injured and hundreds of thousands of ...”

“... which many, including Kim Stanley Robinson and Lem’s most crucial English translator, Michael Kandel, claim as their favourite, and the paranoid-picaresque novels Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and The Futurological Congress, which as a teenage reader I made my talismans.The preoccupations of Lem Two resemble those of Lem One. The ...”

“... and writing, began to hang out together. In the summer of 1964, Jacqueline and their son Michael went to Long Island while Brian stayed in New York working on The Emperor of Ice-Cream. Frank Russell, who had won a Guggenheim for his nature writing, also left New York. Brian and Jean became lovers that summer, and not long afterwards Jacqueline and ...”

“... When​ King Fahd of Saudi Arabia discovered in late November 1990 that his friend Margaret Thatcher had been turfed out of Downing Street after 11 years he thought she must have been the victim of a coup d’état. How else to explain it? She was undefeated in general elections and, more puzzling still, she was about to send her armed forces into battle ...”

“... Except I fancy Clark swung his arms more slowly than Healey, this putting him in a slightly King of the Apes mode.10 September. Catch part of the revamped Round Britain Quiz, none of the contestants a patch on the team of Eric Korn and Irene Thomas with their personalised and often over-informative answers. There is a question on the trivium, the ...”

“... stories he told. Only four days after the Birmingham speech, Ann Dummett, wife of the philosopher Michael Dummett and a community relations officer in Oxford, wrote to the Times that the anecdote about the widow from Wolverhampton had been recounted to her in Oxford recently, but about an old lady in London: ‘Almost every circumstantial detail was the ...”

“... Egypt, where veterans of the Palestine war led by Nasser came to power in the 1952 coup against King Farouk. The repressive capacities of a government such as Egypt’s, whose secret police is said to employ more than a million people, should not be underestimated. But several unpopular regimes may face serious consequences at home for having aligned ...”

“... younger authors, among them Frederick Exley (A Fan’s Notes), Philip Caputo (A Rumour of War) and Michael Mewshaw (Walking Slow), he is the encouraging old pro, spreading the largesse. He recognised and recommended Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road), ‘an all-around swell cat’. The literary shoptalk in these letters is free of jargon and brimming with ...”

“... to be taken seriously (while not forgetting that Shakespeare is also characterised by Henry IV and King John and Timon and Cymbeline). If Dryden died three hundred years ago, then a tercentenary feels like the right moment to ask what his Hamlet is, or what it is that we now recommend him for. The interest of the question is increased, though also ...”

“... He is unable to sleep after murdering Duncan, and unable to give up on his desire to become king. The two things, of course, go together.Macbeth very quickly gets to Kafka’s ‘certain point’ from which there is no giving up or turning back. One of the shocking things about him is the sheer velocity of his ambitious determination. ‘It is in the ...”