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“... places, in each other’s presence. That is the impression one gets from such excellent poems as Michael Longley’s ‘The Linen Workers’ and Derek Mahon’s ‘A Refusal to Mourn’. In 1962, in The New Poetry, there were poems of similar kind and distinction, such as ‘A Peasant’, by R.S. Thomas, and Iain Crichton-Smith’s ‘Old Woman’. All four ...”

“... Nothing was worth saving, and Wisner began to build a new network. Then, on 23 August 1944, King Michael of Romania ended his alliance with Germany.Wisner was ordered to Bucharest to ‘establish the intentions of the Soviet Union regarding Romania’. An advance party of nine agents had been sent ahead of him, including Beverly Bowie, who achieved the coup ...”

“... ideas from his communist and left-wing rivals: clean-up campaigns, anti-corruption purges and the white short-sleeved uniforms that were meant to convey the PAP’s purity. Meanwhile, his ‘Asian Values’ campaign and his 1980s eugenics programme – one of the few initiatives his citizens rejected – owe debts to Japanese fascism, and the PAP’s ...”

“... caught, in collusion with the Mafia, plotting to poison Fidel Castro’s cigars. Ronald Reagan’s White House was run to astrological time, and its chief spent his evenings discussing Armageddon theology with strangers. Oliver North recruited convicted narcotics smugglers to run the secret war against Nicaragua. George Bush recruited Manuel Noriega to the ...”

“... or almost here, and then it’s gone: politics as a dance of blind men thrashing the air with white sticks, while failing to land a single blow on a Struwwelpeter clown-king bent on slow-puncture abdication by photo opportunity, a different costume or a different country every night. This man changes the rules of the game if he is in danger of losing a ...”

“... the previous year that ‘sometimes you remind me of a gentleman in full evening dress and white gloves attempting to put something right with the kitchen plumbing without soiling his attire.’ It comes as no surprise when the great man announces that ‘Edimbourg is nearer to being my spiritual home than is Glasgow.’ Yet one of the many strengths ...”

“... literary era dominated by heap big novelists now facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest ...”

“... to whomever was around or just people-watch. In this millennium, in cafés frequented by young white people, every customer seems to be silently staring at an Apple product, so that the places look and feel like offices. Even this phase may be on the way out. The next phase – of trying to keep customers from sticking around – has arrived. A food ...”

“... and an enemy of the Enlightenment, though he has changed his positive allegiances a good deal; Michael Sandel, like Charles Taylor and Pope John Paul II, makes a great thing of ‘identity’. They stress the difference between the way we are ‘constituted’ by our membership in a variety of communities and the ‘abstract’ individuals that thinkers ...”

“... wave away the menu and say: ‘No oil, no salt, no MSG, no colouring, no flavouring, no sugar, no white flour, no butter. What do you have?’ After the murder, with the newspapers running stories about the hunt for the ‘wolfman’, he starts eating piles of junk food. He also starts wandering around Chicago dressed as a woman, looking for a way of getting ...”

“... made more hazardous by the fact that his mother’s family was wealthy (his uncle owned a white Rolls-Royce – said to be one of only nine in the whole of Russia). Naturally the family was anti-Bolshevik, and equally naturally, the young Alexander was fed Bolshevik heroism and Revolutionary fervour at school. The resulting social tension Solzhenitsyn ...”

“... founded by her friend, Fanny Wright. What Wright had in mind was a commune in which black and white children would be educated together in a Temple of Science. The Nashoba community also advocated the practice of free or ‘rational’ love. Mrs Trollope’s views on this and other aspects of the Nashoba programme, and the degree of her commitment to ...”

“... a sore throat, maybe a fever, maybe no symptoms at all – so what?As the US health secretary Michael Leavitt put it in 2006, ‘anything we say in advance of a pandemic happening is alarmist; anything we say afterwards is inadequate.’ The Chinese government, for all its undoubted faults, instituted rational measures to contain the spread of the virus ...”

“... his death, Daniel Farson wrote an affable, elbow-nudging Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon; Michael Peppiatt followed with the more measured speculations of Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (1996); and last year the Tate staged a small exhibition of his recently uncovered, painfully bathetic sketches on paper. Sylvester, who worked on that and ...”

“... I went to see London Contemporary Dance Theatre and Ballet Rambert at the Oxford Apollo and one of Michael Clark’s earliest forays at the Museum of Modern Art, barebottomed in Bodymap and long sleeves. There wasn’t much more than that going on in London but they did get Merce Cunningham at Sadler’s Wells every now and again, and that was a revelation. I ...”