“... talents. His war poems have a quietness far from the guttering-choking-drowning world of Wilfred Owen, and no other war poet juxtaposed the visionary with the everyday detail of the trenches as he does in ‘Laventie’:Yet the dawn with aeroplanes crawling high at Heaven’s gateLovely aerial beetles of wonderful scintillateStrangest interest, and puffs of ...”

“... the tongue: Jean-Noël Vuarnet, Sylviane Agacinski, Jim West, Mary McCarthy, Gregory Mazurovsky, Richard Foreman, Kate Manheim, Louis and Zuka Mittelberg, Bruno Marcenac, Michel Loriod, Maurice Roche), he now can see that all the high-flown references he had barely understood – to Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan – were no more than intellectualising ...”

“... tried to dress up outing Thiel as his own statement of principle. Gawker’s Silicon Valley editor Owen Thomas (who is himself gay) had written:How many out VCs do you know? I think it explains a lot about Thiel: his disdain for convention, his quest to overturn established rules. Like the immigrant Jews who created Hollywood a century ago, a gay investor has ...”

“... beard care and curated playlists. As with the Beatles album sleeves designed by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, this was where art and pop first locked eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a part of the public ...”

“... each. You can rent one of them on Airbnb.The Salters occupy just a couple of pages in Owen Hatherley’s Red Metropolis, a small part in the story of the early, heterogeneous and fractious London left. They are folded rapidly into the story of the London County Council, run by a zealous Labour Party that was accused at the time of wanting to ...”

“... available in light of the medical knowledge at the time.’ These claims were not true.In​ 1970, Richard Titmuss celebrated Britain’s tradition of voluntary blood donation in The Gift Relationship, warning that paid-for blood carried a greater risk of contamination. But while it was true that most ‘whole blood’ in the UK came from volunteers, blood ...”

“... at Edinburgh, but died young (in the 1990s) from Aids.17 January. Rupert returns from a walk with Owen, his brother, and son Freddy (five), worried because he had been unable to resist giving Freddy a kiss. Freddy is still at infants’ school. Had Rupert been vaccinated when I was, we would not be concerned.18 January. I have worn pretty much the same outfit ...”

“... was still, de jure, a single nation. In 1949, envisaging the possibility of a ‘civil war’, Owen Lattimore wrote: ‘America, which has in China complained of the bad luck of having inherited the Kuomintang through no fault of its own, has in Korea manufactured its own Kuomintang. To support our proclaimed policy of world-wide opposition to police ...”

“... of its leadership is elected. ‘The Chinese do not understand the vote,’ a British investor, Richard Thornton, remarked that June. The Independent commented that one million marching in Hong Kong was even more significant than one million demonstrating in Beijing. David Owen warned that the involvement of the colony ...”

“... to be satirical, like, say, those of Siegfried Sassoon, nor outraged in the manner of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. Many apply the modernist sublime mode developed in poems such as ‘Vendémiaire’ and ‘Cortège’ to the theatre of war, which can result in some rather unnerving comparisons: ‘Que c’est beau ces fusées qui ...”

“... semitic peoples’, as Magnes called it, though he too expected large-scale Jewish immigration. Richard Crossman, who was a member of the commission, concluded that Magnes ‘represented nothing real in Palestine’. This was sadly confirmed by Hourani’s saying that a binational state could work only ‘if a certain spirit of co-operation and trust exists ...”

“... Grimes becomes Britten’s dream of what he might be like if he abandoned Pears’; Owen Wingrave’s sigh ‘I am so tired’ expresses ‘the weariness which by 1970 was so often perceptible in Britten’. Much of the time all that Carpenter is doing as a critic is matching up aspects of Britten’s life with the texts Britten chose to set to ...”

“... 1953. On every visit the congressmen trawled for witnesses with a maximum of tabloid publicity. Richard Nixon’s career was partly forged on the first of these occasions. He served on the original committee, and would soon run for the Senate. Reagan’s earliest thoughts of switching to politics seem to have come just after the war during a sojourn at Lake ...”

“... itself. As Primo Levi wrote, ‘it happened, therefore it can happen again.’Are​ we, as Richard Seymour suggests, ‘in the early days of a new fascism’? In Disaster Nationalism, Seymour argues that in trying to understand the new far right, we have been looking in the wrong places. Parties and policy platforms, or the personalities of ...”

“... they were, though briefly, lovers a reasonable inference made long ago by Virginia Moore, and by Richard Ellmann, though his publisher seems to think Foster the first to make it securely. In the long run it matters less than the occult union, and less than Yeats’s sympathy in her marital misfortunes. There is nobility in his commemoration of John MacBride ...”