“... turns out that as seen from the private quarters the West Wing barely registers. Of course, that may have been the point of these conversations, which Clinton set up with his old friend Branch (they had been roommates together while working on George McGovern’s disastrous presidential campaign of 1972) in order to record for posterity a real-time overview ...”

“... army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000’, and adds that ‘increases in Afghan forces may very well be needed.’ US generals have spoken openly about wanting a combined Afghan army-police-security apparatus of 450,000 soldiers (in a country with a population half the size of Britain’s). Such a force would cost $2 or $3 billion a year to ...”

“... for quotations and for any material that is challenged or likely to be challenged, or the material may be removed. The proliferation of newspaper sources on the internet means that this is often the best place to look for new, verifiable source material (particularly if you are not too bothered about truth). Most of the information out there is recent ...”

“... on the literary scene. Marvell’s habits of poetic imitation and allusiveness, stressed by Smith, may leave a lay audience wanting a wider understanding of his engagement with Ovid and other masters, and broader light on the relations of his writings to those of such contemporaries as Cowley and Cleveland and Denham. Smith’s is only the second ambitious ...”

“... years to spare, you can follow the internet discussions on what ‘quasi-subliminal’ images may or may not have been embedded by the film-makers, but when I was young I would always reliably see what was almost not there; when I was a student, earning a little money by being an experimental subject for trainee ...”

“... a woman who kept her inner life sealed off from scrutiny. Indeed her preoccupation with surfaces may have been her deepest trait. Joe and Rose Kennedy led separate lives: he pursued money, sex and political ambition; she strained after moral and social perfection. They were united in their obsession with keeping up appearances, their pleasure in consorting ...”

“... Pro Milone in defence of a man rightly accused of murdering the ex-mistress’s brother. It may seem a bit odd that a criminal barrister should rise so high in the political firmament, but when we talk about late Roman Republican murder trials we are not talking about gang wars and domestic violence. Given the narrowness of the political elite and the ...”

“... was able to be in her ‘authorised’ biography of Plath, Bitter Fame (1989) – Bate’s book may well go some way to appeasing the ire of those who sought to arraign and convict Hughes for an unspeakable crime. As Bate tells it, Hughes had no need of others’ vitriol to feel haunted and tormented for the 35 years that followed his first wife’s ...”

“... month I was granted British citizenship and I very much love this country. Possibly I may die, but I will die as a free person, and my son and wife are free people. And Britain is a great country.’ Litvinenko died four days later, on 23 November 2006. Six hours before it happened Scotland Yard got a phone call from the Atomic Weapons ...”

“... the crisis in British (and indeed Western) society would be economic before it was political. It may yet turn out that way. For now, though, what has happened amounts to a collapse of our political system. The fact that the leadership of both main parties has disintegrated would under normal circumstances be a big story, but in the current chaos it is no ...”

“... book is already extreme. In any case, it’s a possibility that isn’t floated, and the reason may be that the narrator, despite any amount of helpless love, has no reason to trust his mother. There hasn’t been a first-person narrator in a McEwan novel since Enduring Love in 1997 (and before that only in his first, The Cement Garden, 1978, and then in ...”

“... stalking. Petrarch gives some precise-seeming pointers to the identity of Laura, though even they may only be another layer of the mordantly playful mythologising which is one aspect of the Canzoniere. The best-known source of biographical clues is a handwritten inscription on the flyleaf of the ‘Ambrosian Virgil’, Petrarch’s cherished and much ...”

“... emperor had had enough. He offered the governance of Italy to Theodoric and his followers (whom we may for convenience call the Ostrogoths, though they were a pretty diverse lot), if they could take it from Odoacer. Theodoric duly defeated Odoacer at Verona in September 489 and accepted his field army’s surrender at Milan shortly afterwards. He then trapped ...”

“... Yet Huaxia is plagued with ambiguities. And Ge’s new expression, ‘cultural community’, which may sound natural to English readers, has a strange ring in Chinese. The term gongtongti derives from an early 20th-century Japanese neologism, kyōdōtai, which in turn has echoes of the German Volk, or national community. Its use in modern Chinese is recent and ...”

“... it, then it is. Ricks states that ‘criticism is the art of noticing things that the rest of us may well not have noticed for ourselves and might never have noticed. It asks tact, of itself and of its readers, for it must neither state nor neglect the obvious.’ The things that Ricks notices are often verbal felicities, which for him are not simply sources ...”