“... Four years ago, on 28 January 2003, in his State of the Union address to Congress, George Bush referred to the prisoners – more than ten and a half thousand of them – the United States had taken into custody in the course of the war in Afghanistan and the so-called war on terror. Not all were in prison, he said: some had been ‘otherwise dealt with ...”

“... to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth catching if they’d been on it in the first place. Perhaps ...”

“... old man mumbled something unconvincing about property prices. Why did the quintessentially English Michael Moorcock nominate the second Confederate governor of Texas’s mansion in Bastrop, thirty miles out of Austin, as a suitable estate for his tax exile? Only the cats know. Spooky, over-refined Egyptian beasts who are let out on a leash while the dew is on ...”

“... Nothing was worth saving, and Wisner began to build a new network. Then, on 23 August 1944, King Michael of Romania ended his alliance with Germany.Wisner was ordered to Bucharest to ‘establish the intentions of the Soviet Union regarding Romania’. An advance party of nine agents had been sent ahead of him, including Beverly Bowie, who achieved the coup ...”

“... balance-of-payments surplus. By that summer, following Labour’s loss of office and the defeat of George Brown in his Belper seat, he had become Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and heir-apparent to the leadership. But within eighteen months the dispute about Britain’s membership of the Common Market had torn Labour apart. Roy Jenkins had resigned as ...”

“... fate to illustrate the equally peculiar destiny of the heritage concept under the National Trust. George Lansbury was vice-chairman of the Trust when Sutton House was adopted in 1936, at a time when there seemed no conflict between conservation and public utility: the house was to be used for ‘public and social service’ purposes. But then came the ...”

“... Britain by William Klein examines some of the modifications. The picture is further modified by Michael Mendle’s searching essay on the constitutional programme of Charles I’s Parliamentary opponents in 1641-2. In the emergency created by royal mismanagement, Mendle argues, MPs were concerned less to assert legislative rights than to seize executive ...”

“... seven months at the Press Lehmann made his first appearance as an editor when he commissioned Michael Roberts’s New Signatures (February 1932), which included contributions from Julian Bell, Richard Eberhart, William Empson, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, William Plomer and Lehmann himself. Through Spender he met Christopher Isherwood. The friendship ...”

“... His sentences are as pungent and as full of character as his music’ etc) and as described by Michael Tanner in the letter pages of this journal as ‘the greatest English prose of our time, I think’ (LRB, 3-16 February 1983), is Craft’s prose. Craft’s essayistic prose is indistinguishable from what is ostensibly Stravinsky’s in his answers to ...”

“... solutions to the present crisis. The traditional social democratic solution, tried by George Brown and Harold Wilson in the Sixties and by Michael Foot and Jim Callaghan in the Seventies, is the ‘social contract’ – a private deal between the Government and the unions, by which the unions trade wage ...”

“... at least some of them, imagined themselves to be blazing a trail for advanced industrial society. George Brown’s incomes policy and National Plan and, later, the Social Contract were claimed as major socio-economic innovations – British firsts. The Manchu Empire had suffered similar ethnocentric delusions and had published maps which showed it to lie at ...”

“... now on, the Daily Express would be a Labour newspaper. I expected all the formidable skills of George Malcolm Thompson – or old Greenwich Mean Time, as we used to call the chief leader-writer – to be directed first to securing the leadership of the Labour Party for my hero, Aneurin Bevan. Thereafter, no effort was to be spared in achieving the election ...”

“... very happy at Shrewsbury, especially in my last year, when Trench was replaced at School House by Michael Charlesworth, a kind and courteous man, quite the opposite of his predecessor. It is not true, as naive left-wing rhetoric sometimes has it, that British public schools dragoon their boys into rigid and orthodox opinions. At Shrewsbury in the ...”

“... 20 grand a year seems to be the favoured target. Beryl Bainbridge owns up to making £35,000 and Michael Holroyd regards £70,000 as a decent haul. Will Self can manage on anything between £40,000 and £80,000. At the bottom end of the scale there are poets who would happily settle for a regular 12 grand. Writers with film and mass-media connections ...”

“... someone is about Covid-19, the less you should trust them.’ The author, Bristol epidemiologist George Davey Smith, argued that there are ‘many rational people with scientific credentials making assertive public pronouncements on Covid-19 who seem to suggest there can be no legitimate grounds for disagreeing with them’. He had a point. Even those ...”