“... the scene in The Blues Brothers where Jake and Elwood arrive at a swanky restaurant called Chez Paul to try and persuade their old trumpet player, Mr Fabulous, to rejoin the band. ‘From the start,’ Klein writes, ‘it was obvious that Woody was going to be in rare form that night. He swooped down on the hors d’oeuvres and gathered clumps of them in ...”

“... The message that the bomb had saved a million American lives, in the words of the historian Paul Ham, ‘put the American mind at ease, [and] slipped into folklore’. When, in 1994, the Smithsonian Institution announced plans to exhibit Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber which had destroyed Hiroshima, along with contextual commentary casting doubt on the ...”

“... seem to have a certain romantic quality. A former CIA officer enlisted in the war effort, Paul Miller is one of the few US officials of that period who focused his career on Afghanistan. From the CIA he made his way to the staff of Douglas Lute, adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan to both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Between 2007 and 2009 Miller was ...”

“... position in 1981, Reagan never missed an opportunity to criticise the economic legacy of the Carter administration.) The Tories might well reset the inflation target, on a desperate-times-demand-desperate-measures basis, and assuming there will never again be as clear-cut a window of political opportunity. Inflation might not be far off 4 per cent ...”

“... school exercise book and becomes the conduit for a writerly correspondence; a disregarded copy of Paul Bowles’s Let it Come Down lolls on the counter of a pub, a gift already regretted; another gift, received from a stranger by the 17-year-old narrator while she is working on checkout 19 at the local supermarket, sits unopened by the till:I put the book on ...”

“... We are used to hard words from Belfast and the impingement (even in so wry and oblique a talent as Paul Muldoon) of uncomfortable sectarian truths. But McGuckian is like Denton Welch, whose war-diaries make no mention of the war: we can only just make out this century, let alone her own particular time and place. In a recent Muldoon poem which turns his fellow ...”

“... MS-13 was started by El Salvadoreans in exile from the violent military governments backed by the Carter and Reagan administrations. A wave of deportations in the 1990s returned some of the gang members to El Salvador, creating what Luiselli calls ‘a transnational army’. The history that led to the wave of children arriving at the border is an ...”

“... the $100 spanner, or the $1000 toilet seat, or about having an Assistant Secretary of Defense (Paul Thayer) in jail – these are the mere ephemera of an administration utterly devoted to pouring hundreds of billions of dollars towards Lockheed, Boeing, Rockwell, General Dynamics, Martin Marietta and so on. Even though there’s no money to pay for ...”

“... of the former Shell executive Philip Carroll to run the Baghdad energy ministry was logical, given Paul Bremer’s belief that the Iraqi Governing Council’s attachment to oil nationalisation ‘had to be changed’. Bremer’s first act as proconsul, after all, had been directed at the 190 state-owned companies and their 650,000 employees: he fired half a ...”

“... was executed and the Kingdom of God failed to materialise, his followers reworked his message. Paul taught that Jesus had been resurrected bodily up to heaven and would return at any moment to gather his believers. It seems that Paul at first assumed he would live to see that day, then came to imagine an interim state ...”

“... hostility to Oslo, and had compared trading land for peace to appeasement with Hitler. Mishal, Paul McGeough writes in Kill Khalid, his gripping account of the plot, was selected from a list of targets by Netanyahu not only because he was suspected of orchestrating the suicide bomb campaign, but because he made an articulate case for Hamas’s position, in ...”

“... and were his murals in the Parisian churches of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Saint-Vincent-de-Paul to be cleaned, they would be acclaimed as among the most solemn and powerful works of religious art created in recent centuries. These issues preoccupy British critics and historians rather less than American or French ones, partly because, with few ...”

“... the way in which great art creates its own rules and vision. Bayley writes approvingly of Paul Celan’s poems, which create their own ‘absolute vision’, and of the way Auden’s work is a magic that ‘completely enchants and dispossesses what it celebrates’. The great work of art, in Bayley’s ideal, seems to relate to the world as the great ...”

“... airplanes needed for a massive aerial assault on Fretilin’s mountain redoubts, the Carter Administration secretly supplied them, while lying to the Congress and the public that an embargo on military equipment was in place. At the United Nations, the US Ambassador Patrick Moynihan did everything he could to line up support to block UN ...”

“... rates and risk a recession that would weaken Richard Nixon’s chances of re-election. When Paul Volcker was made the Fed chair in 1979, he acted without regard for the potential political fallout, raising interest rates to nearly 20 per cent and causing unemployment to rocket; in 1982, it reached a high of 10.8 per cent (its peak after the 2008 ...”