“... vicious ambiguity: what was done to her? Or, what has she done to herself? After Colin Dexter and John Thaw’s Inspector Morse, Ian Rankin’s Rebus and Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, Rachel raises the tradition of the alcoholic detective to a new level. The novel’s main protagonist spends most of her time on train journeys, with no ...”

“... of those in the government have tended to harden. A few weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, Tony Blair told the Labour Party conference that people should keep in mind the common values of Jews, Muslims and Christians. ‘The true followers of Islam are our brothers and sisters in this struggle,’ he said. ‘Bin Laden is no more ...”

“... State Prison, near San Francisco; he had expected a five-dollar birthday cheque from an aunt in Washington and been advanced a box of Camels by Billy Oberholster, the biggest of the prison’s lenders, with the promise of the cheque as surety. Juleson smokes his cigarettes, but the cheque never arrives: ‘You fool, you fool, he told himself . . . his aunt ...”

“... what took place at Beijing airport on Monday, 21 February 1972. It’s also the opening scene of John Adams’s opera Nixon in China, premiered in Houston in 1987, and staged again at the London Coliseum over a few evenings last summer. An actual occurrence then, but also, as Adams and his librettist Alice Coleman understood, a brightly lit performance with ...”

“... 1982 should have been 15 percentage points higher than it was. Thatcher’s government, and later John Major’s, experimented with various other methods for containing inflation. In 1988, Thatcher’s second chancellor, Nigel Lawson, proposed making the Bank of England independent and tasking it with keeping down inflation, the path New Labour took when it ...”

“... grown shakier still. Should Iran and Syria succeed in rapidly establishing new relationships with Washington under the Obama administration, these governments will be further weakened. Moreover, their inability (or their unwillingness) to do more to resolve the Palestine question, or even to alleviate Palestinian suffering, has been exposed once again. It ...”

“... Riyadh was flatly opposed to any negotiations with the government and advocated arming the rebels; Washington, London and Paris were soon publicly considering the idea. By this time, however, the armed rebellion was no longer dominated by the supposedly moderate FSA. Explicitly jihadi movements, notably the al-Qaida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, were gaining ...”

“... the taxi-driver – who else? – of the death of the American Ambassador. It was August 1968, and John Gordon Mein had been assassinated that morning. This was an abrupt introduction to the complexities of Guatemalan politics, and I merely assumed – with the Vietnam War and the less-publicised Guatemalan guerrilla war of the Sixties well underway – that ...”

“... this smart, satirical European journalist provoking the staid and gentlemanly Yankees. George Washington, Abigail Adams and her son John Quincy Adams all praised him, with self-congratulation for American tolerance of his right to free speech. In England, the King spoke of him as ‘my friend, Cobbett’. When he was 37 ...”

“... Left, Michael Walzer, in a work glowingly evoked by the still more eminent liberal philosopher John Rawls, in his aptly entitled The Law of Peoples. Indeed in attacking Iraq, we will be doing no more than completing the vital preventive strike against the Osirak reactor of 1981. Who now complains about that? 4. The Human Costs of War. These are indeed ...”

“... It is John Ashbery who takes the cake – in this case, the triple-decker cake with the solitary little sugar bride on top – for his description of Elizabeth Bishop: she is ‘the poets’ poets’ poet’. It sounds farcical, but it’s strictly true, and there’s as little getting round it as there is improving on it ...”

“... an editorial in the New York Times and a defensive op-ed by Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, in the Washington Post. Facebook is big, and it seems to be everywhere. Founded in early 2004, restricted first to Harvard, then to students at American universities, and now open to anyone, the site claims 500 million users, having passed MySpace to become the largest ...”

“... Elena Kagan, Barack Obama’s nominee to replace the retiring Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee in late June. Before she is confirmed by the committee, she will have to answer questions about her views on the constitution and her lack of judicial experience ...”

“... he set to work on a thriller, using as his models Alistair MacLean and the Travis McGee series by John MacDonald, which focuses on a happy-go-lucky investigator with a romantic code of honour. Grant’s first stab at a name for his hero was Franklin, but one day, in an Asda in Kendal, his wife watched him grab something from a high shelf and remarked that, if ...”

“... before bed. He got interested in politics, joined the debating team, and considered going to Washington to intern for the Republican who represented his home district. (He cast his first vote for Reagan; later he would vote for Ross Perot because ‘you need someone really insane to fix the economy’; but by the time he wrote about politics, profiling ...”