“... have written with distinction in a language that was not their first. Native language matters more than native place. Robert Frost was a Californian who entrenched himself in New England. T.S. Eliot, for all his Russell Square papistry, came from St Louis. These poets grew to be associated with the territories they adopted and which adopted them. The idea ...”

“... to Cinna’s death illustrates an axiom in information theory, textual criticism and gossip: the more often a message is transmitted, the more corrupted it becomes. The word ‘Cinna’ is passed from mouth to mouth in a large group, and eventually, inevitably, misinterpreted. ‘The first man told it to another, and that ...”

“... not impossible, to imagine Bernard Shaw at a loss for words. The thing indeed occurred in 1928 at Thomas Hardy’s funeral, when Shaw and Kipling were paired in the procession of mourners but could find nothing whatever to say to each other. Shaw’s own excuse was that it was absurd to have coupled such a tall man with such a very short one. This is very ...”

“... the one that has had the greatest impact on America and, indirectly, the world. Never was a movie more aptly named; and rarely have quotations marks been more superfluous than in the subtitle of Melvyn Stokes’s informative book. What did Griffith bring into the world? Imagine an unholy combination of The Passion of the ...”

“... a young gentleman volunteer; John Davis, the great navigator; J. Jane, a friend of Davis’s; and Thomas Lodge the poet. Thomas Cavendish was a man of considerable estate but varying fortunes, and like many of his contemporaries he took to the sea to improve them: they were at their charming height in 1588, when he returned ...”

“... why there is no ‘exit strategy’. Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has ...”

“... means that the political centre of the court will now probably settle on Justice Gorsuch. He is a more interesting jurist than liberals at first admitted. He recently wrote the decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, in which the court held that employees are protected from discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity. (Liberals may ...”

“... But the second Trump presidency privileges some parts of the constitution over others. The more than sixty executive orders made by the White House since Trump’s inauguration take their authority from Article II of the constitution, which establishes the executive branch of government and lays out the president’s powers and responsibilities.The ...”

“... somewhat wider historical interest is the fact – which everyone knows in general but which it is more difficult to imagine concretely – that one could then quite unremarkably drive from door to door in Central London and park one’s car outside one’s club. This is the world in which Sassoon is moving around in the years recorded in this third volume of ...”

“... been, to say nothing of many a lesser figure. In what might be called the peripheral stakes Dylan Thomas and even David Jones have had more attention in some quarters – in the case of Dylan Thomas, with a wild publicity which has had little enough to do with his work. MacDiarmid, it is ...”

“... with the name. Lars Trier, a boy from Denmark, went to film school and changed his name to the more aristocratic Lars von Trier. In Trier on von Trier the question of the name opens the account of the director’s life. ‘I started using the name again at film school, because it seemed the most provocative thing I could do,’ von Trier explains. ‘No ...”

“... seeks analogies between Germany’s experience and possible ways of recuperating the more or less unredeemed American past. What Nietzsche called ‘monumental’ history extracts from the past a particular great and worthy deed and uses it as a model: by showing that a thing was ‘at least possible once’ we see that it ‘may well again be ...”

“... For Sir Thomas Browne it was a commonplace that ‘the number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live.’ But this is no longer necessarily true, as has been pointed out in these pages before now: there may be more people living now than all the people who have ever died ...”

“... of the so-called Reformation Parliament, national business, derived from London interests. Sir Thomas More’s repressive reaction to the early Protestant movement was focused on London, as was Queen Anne Boleyn’s promotion of it. The fall of the reforming statesman Thomas Cromwell happened in London, with ...”

“... in another the early drafts of his great book, The Everlasting Man; while in a drawer I found more personal things: Chesterton’s passport, his pen, his spectacles, a Papal Medal, and his rosary.’ One may be edified, I suppose, by the Papal Medal and the rosary while at the same time feeling that early drafts of Chesterton’s most important work of ...”