“... afternoon,’ she wrote in 1967. ‘Tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the north-east whining down the Cajon and San Gorgonio passes … We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks.’ A hot Santa Ana wind in summer turns grass and brush into kindling. A lightning bolt, an electrical spark, a camper’s fire can easily ...”

“... from the bonds of marriage, he took up not only with Assia Wevill but also with a woman called Susan Alliston, who is mentioned in ‘18 Rugby Street’, in Birthday Letters, as ‘holding me from my telephone/Those nights you would most need me’. Alliston, who also wrote and published her own poetry, and was interested, like Hughes, in anthropology, was ...”

“... and graver science, brings us back again.’This was certainly true of the trips Camus made to North and South America in 1946 and 1949. In the diaries he kept – collected in an elegant new translation by Ryan Bloom – Camus seems unusually vulnerable, as if he’d forgotten to strike one of his customary poses. (Camus had acted in the theatre in ...”

“... West for the cause of Kurds; he has reported from Belfast during the Troubles, from Zimbabwe, from North Korea, always speaking up for those on the receiving end of mindless brutality, and often risking personal harm in doing so. Yet he is self-aware enough to recognise that all of this activity is just scratching the surface of political commitment. My own ...”

“... Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude. They are not ...”

“... this year all the trade, literary and political figures present at the opening in Budapest travel north on the following day to the coalmining town of Salgotarjan. A crowd has gathered outside the arts centre; there are speeches, poetry, a choir performance and a band playing Country and Western, with Hungarian lyrics. It is raining again, but the crowd is ...”

“... stop breaking into giant systems but uncertain of what to do when he gets there; his satellites, Susan Thunder, sometime prostitute, valued by the mob for ‘social-engineering skills’, which meant bamboozling janitors and secretaries and other human inconveniences, the deluded Roscoe and Lenny DiCicco, the betrayed disciple, later Judas; next a German ...”

“... confronts this prejudice in his new volume. Dividing his poems into those set in exile in the ‘North’ (the United States and Britain) and those of the ‘South’ (the Antilles and Greece), he seems about to offer a conventional contrast between hot and cold. In one of the first poems, we observe him shivering in exile through a Manhattan winter, ‘flu ...”

“... of homicides and police shootings in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Staten Island, Houston, San Antonio, North Charlotte, Chicago, Baton Rouge and other cities have been taken into evidence in criminal investigations and in civil suits against local police forces. They have fuelled the Black Lives Matter movement and the gathering outrage over the difference in ...”

“... nerve to put him in a Western or a gangster picture? He did excellent knockabout adventure on the north-west frontier in Gunga Din (truly a boys’ club film). But for the most part, though he did carry off a white negligée with marabou trimming in Bringing Up Baby, it’s hard to think of Grant dressed in anything so informal as even an open-neck shirt. If ...”

“... of how Sun Myung Moon (his American name – real name, Young Myung Mun), from his origins as a North Korean peasant, has built a politico-religious empire with an annual revenue of over half a billion dollars (making it one of the world’s largest 50 private corporations). The young Moon seems to have been an ordinary enough peasant child until, at ...”

“... to the official view, independent thought was the pathetic pastime of a few outliers like Susan Sontag, who had the temerity to ask: ‘Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilisation” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed ...”

“... affiliation with non-American currents of thought, habits of life – styles of radical will, in Susan Sontag’s phrase – have continued well past that now excoriated decade. But a great deal of the change in the country has to do with re-configurations in demography and economic power. Regional characteristics, once as stable and as predictable as any ...”

“... prime-time featuring of two explicitly ‘pro-choice’ speakers, Colin Powell and Congresswoman Susan Molinari, and by the entire tone of Dole’s acceptance speech, long on tolerance, silent on abortion. Again, the logic of this strategy of dissociation was quite simple. Of all voters, the New Republicans are the least likely to go over to Clinton, whose ...”

“... has used its clout to coerce Mexico and Canada into forming an alliance called the Organisation of North American Nations for, apparently, no other reason than the chance to use the acronym Onan. In addition, a large part of New England – basically everything above Boston – has been ceded to, or forced on, Canada, and renamed the Great Concavity; it now ...”