“... allies the US had assembled at the meeting. Keynes’s last effort to check the growth of American power had failed. He died six weeks later. At the end of the Second World War, many thought that a lasting peace would be possible only if we learned to manage the world economy. The fact that the worst war in history had followed shortly on the heels of the ...”

“... upcoming neighbouring nations. ‘Declinism has to be seen as the unwitting last refuge of great power delusions … a form of jingoism, a delusion about inherent superiority, dressed up as critique.’ Less convincingly, Edgerton suggests that decline did not really set in until the 1980s. Until then, ‘British economic nationalism’ kept functioning ...”

“... Oklahoma’s attorney general, he wrote a piece in the National Review attacking Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which he was in the process of suing the EPA over when Trump nominated him to lead it: ‘Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. That debate should be ...”

“... war studies department, where he is professor of history and foreign policy (he used to hold the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress), and foreign policy adviser to both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss; this month he was commissioned to lead yet another defence policy review. In 2016, Bew published a ...”

“... world – assumed that this would happen when a body of professional experts were given the power and authority to devise and enforce appropriate blueprints. Then, in the Seventies, planners got a bad name. In Britain, national economic planning, for years ceaselessly battered by the stop-go waves, finally collapsed in a shambles of vacuous incomes ...”

“... as Sitwell calls it) all at once. As a piece of music, Façade has something of the allusive power of the contemporaneous Waste Land. There is clearly a world behind the capricious surface. Personalities such as the bearish Mr Wagg or Mr Belaker ‘the allegro negro cocktail-shaker’ (though reduced to his ‘navy-blue ghost’) have the peculiar ...”

“... From His Teens’, Melville intrudes directly to caution the reader – much in the manner of Henry James in Portrait of a Lady, on behalf of the romantically youthful Isabel Archer – not precipitously to judge someone destined to suffer unduly. Paragraphs in which his characters are allowed to exult in their situations tend to conclude with dropped ...”

“... indeed of the audience, to Baldwin’s work remains intense. The complexity of his character, the power of his prose and the abiding importance of his subjects make him a writer to argue with and confront as well as to admire. He made his essays out of his arguments with himself, and this gives them a compelling honesty and edge. In his novels, he sought to ...”

“... special frisson to death by poison. In 1612 the death of James’s heir, Charles’s elder brother Henry, was ascribed to poison. The charge was false, but in the following year the political world was rocked by the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower by agents of the wife of the king’s then leading minister, Overbury’s enemy the Earl of ...”

“... The army adopted a strict literacy standard, motivated in part, as the secretary of war Henry L. Stimson noted in his diary, by a desire to ‘keep down the number of coloured troops’. (Given the inadequacy of southern public education, the literacy requirement also excluded a considerable number of whites. My father, Jack D. Foner, later the ...”

“... likeness, commissioned by a pious king for an impetuous son, would offer similar testimony to the power of saintly bodies. The automaton resides today in the Smithsonian, reminding us of humanity’s long-standing desire to create life that survives death – an impulse once fulfilled through religion, and now often through technology.How true is the Don ...”

“... most subtle originality, in fact, could be said to anticipate and even to make a principle out of Henry James’s comment: ‘Properly speaking, relations stop nowhere, and the task of the artist is eternally but to draw the circle in which they shall happily appear to do so.’ James’s way of doing this was to squeeze the orange, as it were – to saturate ...”

“... the late Kim Il Sung’s dream of self-reliance. His son, Kim Jong Il, holds the reins of power in league with the Armed Forces, and both need the food aid to maintain their positions. The United States, not for the first time, is substituting ‘humanitarian assistance’ for foreign policy. Is the food aid going to the Army? What effect will it have ...”

“... an area the size of Scotland, and the splendour of his court was a challenge to the colonising power. The earliest description comes from a Dutchman, Dierick Ruiters, who visited the city at the beginning of the 17th century. He was impressed by ‘a great broad street, not paved, which seemeth to be seven or eight times broader than the Warmoes street in ...”

“... her thoughts were. Either way, imploring him to remember can only yield a poor outcome. There is power in these acts of withdrawal; chilling the room takes energy. But it is not a competitive power: Rossetti is interested in revealing to the winners the ugliness of the game they are playing, and in asking whether there are ...”