“... flitter off into Fine Writing. In 1979, Too Far to Go was adapted into a television film starring Michael Moriarty and the divine Blythe Danner that still holds up today, if you can find it.The​ longest, purest romance of Updike’s life was with the New Yorker, which began as an ‘adolescent crush’ – pre-adolescent, really: ‘I fell in love with the ...”

“... jerks’, joining notorious loudmouths of the era such as the New York Yankees’ bullying owner George Steinbrenner (another Roy Cohn client). From the Bronx to the Battery, opinion on Trump set as hard as the cement on his construction sites and as fast as he had ordered underpaid Polish immigrant construction workers in 1980 to jackhammer the Art Deco ...”

“... even a minimal awareness of the circumstances of the eastward push of Nato after 1990. President George H.W. Bush, in return for a united Germany, had promised that Nato would expand ‘not one inch eastward’; and the evacuation of this pledge in the years that followed, under Clinton, the younger Bush and Obama, has rightly been considered a betrayal by ...”

“... in the cells. A major disappearance is the railway bridge that once carried, along with promos for George Davis and Reggie Kray, passengers from Dalston Junction to Broad Street: a lovely aerial view of industry, canal, domestic and commercial property, Shoreditch to City. You saw, precisely, where you were. For a token fee (often no fee), you became a ...”

“... Isadora Duncan, Alla Nazimova, Pola Negri, Tamara Karsavina, Katharine Cornell, Marie Laurencin, Michael Strange and Eva Le Gallienne in the 1920s and 1930s to Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hope Williams, Libby Holman, Ona Munson (Belle Watling in Gone with the Wind), Poppy Kirk (a Schiaparelli model and prominent diplomat’s wife) and many others in ...”

“... machine are over,’ Mandelson told those who questioned the propriety of the gift. Along with George Robertson, Mo Mowlam and Chris Smith, he was trained by the fascinating and secretive British-American Project for a Successor Generation, which instructs young and friendly natives, who look likely to climb the provincial ladder of power, on the ...”

“... functions in this way, making the reader or audience rethink the various meanings of the work. As Michael Zeitlin notes in an essay on the ‘Post-Modern sequel’ in Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel, ‘a text conventionally defined as a “sequel” can work a transformative effect upon its precursor, which thereby becomes ...”

“... Paul Lauter’s revisionist Heath Anthology of American Literature (1990) and Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner’s English Literatures of America (1996), but they do so in diametrically opposed ways. The new Norton turns outward to include a staggering array of post-colonial writers, from Chinua Achebe to Alice Munro to Les Murray. (None of the ten ...”

“... and when they defer to or expatiate upon European theorists of translation like Walter Benjamin or George Steiner, it is easy to miss, as I think Christopher Reid did, the altogether un-European urgency of their concern. For them, translation, and the disputable possibility of it (at least as regards verse), is a matter neither academic nor narrowly ...”

“... 1992. They all hoped for the election of Clinton, because it got rid of the hated ‘moderate’ George Bush and also gave them the ideal Democrat against whom to ‘define’ themselves.) After his triumph last November, I got hold of Gingrich’s doctoral thesis from Tulane University. It was about education policy in the Belgian Congo. Not very well ...”

“... and idiom which concentrates the feeling, in a manner reminiscent of 16th-century poets like George Gascoigne or Barnaby Googe. Elsewhere, in ‘Maidenhead: Written at the Request of a Friend’, ‘Ephelia’ shows that she could have mixed it metaphysically with John Donne himself. All of these selections confirm Fowler’s claim that ‘the period was ...”

“... public health departments. Soon afterwards, those local authorities were an easy target for George Osborne’s austerity programme. In the last decade, their central funding has been cut by an unthinkable 60 per cent, with little possibility of recouping more than a sliver of that loss from council tax, which the Tory government also decided to ...”

“... good’.It was only after substantial Tory losses in the North at the 2014 European elections that George Osborne launched a regional empowerment scheme called the Northern Powerhouse. Hazeldine describes it as ‘a public-relations device to highlight Conservative good works’. Northern discontent turned out not just to be a political problem but a profound ...”

“... directions. Francis seems particularly poor at choosing his collaborators. The Australian cardinal George Pell, given the task of running the new ministry, had been in trouble on numerous occasions as archbishop of Melbourne for allegedly protecting paedophile priests, and has himself faced charges of paedophilia. How wise was it to appoint a man who was such ...”

“... and disdainful Ganguly, particularly loathsome, whereas one gets the feeling that they reckon Michael Vaughan to be a thoroughly decent bloke – more or less one of their own. Cricket has undoubtedly gained hugely from the friendly rivalry of this Ashes series, particularly by way of comparison with other sports, above all football, which seems a ...”