“... commentary on Britain . . . And it shifted in tone; from the anxious to the apocalyptic. In John Fowles’s novel Daniel Martin, published in 1977, the expatriate narrator says of his homeland: ‘England is already a thing in a museum, a dying animal in a zoo.’ Beckett pulls many other examples (Lessing, Drabble, Spark) from what he calls the ...”

“... one does: ‘When I was in graduate school I was startled to find this story’s source in The John Collier Reader, – or so I have always believed until this afternoon, when I first riffled, then paged carefully, front to back, back to front, through the local copy (Knopf, 1972) and discovered no trace of such a story anywhere in the book.’ But over ...”

“... of evidence on Trump himself is puzzling after the strenuous emphasis of Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan; this looks like another sign that impeachment is not something to count on. ‘Foreign emoluments’ is the most plausible charge, but the phrase has a distant sound and one of the words will need explaining. And yet, the idea of a ...”

“... notice she wished to avert.’ This comes from Johnston’s charming memoir of the art historians John Fleming and Hugh Honour, published last year.* They too were part of the Lubbock household; their own memory of Origo’s visits was summed up in a sentence: ‘Then this icicle appeared and the whole house pulled itself together.’ Thirty years after her ...”

“... that he won’t, not until he can be sure an amenable successor will be elected in his place. John McDonnell is due to present an amendment at the Labour Party Conference in September that would reduce the proportion of MPs needed to nominate a leader from 15 per cent of the parliamentary party to 5 per cent. This rule change may come to seem less ...”

“... tones, while falling far short of withdrawing their support for Trump. Listening to Paul Ryan, John McCain, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Orrin Hatch inveigh against the evil of white supremacy, you might have thought they’d just dusted off their copies of Between the World and Me. They can hardly claim to have been shocked by Trump’s response, however. As ...”

“... any woman the fate in question. May Bartram dies near the end of the novella, of course, while John Marcher marches on, devoting some time to waffling about how he had now suffered the dreaded blow – that he had missed the chance to love May. May’s fate, he tells himself, wasn’t so terrible, since she got to love him. OK. I thought also of the varied ...”

“... cows, hawking bread in the streets, scaring birds, bookkeeping for the parish overseer. Like John Clare, who escaped to the woods to read ‘Sixpenny Romances’ as a child, he loved books and hid them from stern elders who equated reading with laziness. Unlike Clare, he got money for books from stealing and used to squirrel away halfpence when he was ...”

“... minister, that the bank’s autonomy over monetary policy should no longer be taken for granted. John McDonnell has said that it would be brought to heel in the first week of a Labour government. After the 2016 US election, some assumed that Donald Trump would end the Fed’s independence. But so far he has done little besides expressing his disapproval when ...”

“... best stories come in Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron by the adventurer Edward John Trelawny, and so are a bit too good to be quite true, but they are evidence of the way Shelley came across. Trelawny’s account of Shelley’s attempt to learn how to swim in a deep pool in the Arno catches the thing very well:He doffed his jacket and ...”

“... new development: under Obama the federal government began prosecuting whistleblowers, including John Kiriakou, the CIA counterterrorism officer who spent two years in jail for exposing the Bush administration’s torture programme. Kiriakou is the sort of honourable public servant who could have become a source for Hersh. Many still exist, but in the ...”

“... which a character based on Banks appears; two excellent accounts from the 1990s by the historian John Gascoigne situated Banks in the context of the English Enlightenment and the empire; Neil Chambers in 2007 contextualised Banks in the history of collecting; Patricia Fara has a rollicking go at Banks as an exploitative imperialist in Sex, Botany and Empire ...”

“... in office. For twenty years after 1846, Liberal government was kept on the road not just by Lord John Russell and Palmerston but by their two most reliable and businesslike cabinet supporters: Sir George Grey, Charles’s nephew, and Sir Charles Wood, Charles’s son-in-law. Commentators fond of political flamboyance considered both men dispensable, but ...”

“... there.Is there a founding Bosch cosmology? In Berlin, on the back of a large panel showing Saint John on Patmos, Bosch painted a vision of the universe. (There are others in his work: this one strikes me as the most deeply felt.) It is organised in concentric circles. In the innermost ring there’s a mountain with a single touch of fire at its base – the ...”

“... and class favouritism that were levelled against North, Pitt, Sidmouth and Wellington, as well as John Major, Neil Hamilton and Alan B’Stard, and that did most to destroy the Tory regime in 1830 and again in 1997.The new trade border in the Irish Sea may well prove difficult to remove, especially since the government seems reluctant to admit to it, and ...”