“... to have lost all realistic appreciation of what the military can and cannot do. The man with a hammer misinterprets every problem as a nail. (This cognitive bias is called the Fallacy of the Instrument.) Likewise, the country with unrivalled military power sees its environment in a distorted way. Highly attuned to threats posed by hostile states, the Bush ...”

“... and mysterious than it is. It is interesting, but in the way hitting yourself in the face with a hammer is interesting: novel, painful and incredibly stupid. It began in October 2017 as a series of posts on 4Chan, a bulletin board where lonely young men competed to amuse one another with sniggering memes, racist jokes and outré porn, in which an anonymous ...”

“... rhythm, a very personal, measured gather and tumble of polysyllables, after the unhearing jack-hammer blast of the early poems. A tiredness or regret – anticipating the tone in For the Union Dead and after – begins to make itself heard. The articulacy of the poems never exceeds their bemusement, whether it’s the murderer Czar Lepke’s ...”

“... to the fulfilment of particular policy objectives. The wave of nationalisations after 1945 was a hammer blow to municipal independence: council-owned gas, water and electricity companies (and their profits) were transferred to central government control, depriving councils of a huge chunk of their independent income. The foundation of the NHS led to the ...”

“... fit no particular pattern, but often cross: it was pleasing to learn that the half-Ghanaian actor Paul Danquah, most famous for his role in Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey, was later a consultant for the World Bank, and lived at different times with both John Minton and Francis Bacon. Such is Parker’s encyclopedic knowledge of this world. He made a ...”