“... covertly in his Memoirs (1991), there’s a feeling that Larkin’s poems, splendid though they may be, are in need of corrective piss-taking and don’t carry the weight that ‘any novel does’. After his death, in 1995, Amis took less of a battering than Larkin had. Martin Amis’s Experience (2000) softened the prevailing image of him as the meanest ...”

“... on the pilot got up and running. ‘Shut off your cameras,’ said the arresting officer, which may be what Los Angeles police say now instead of reading people their Miranda Rights. But don’t worry: the cameras were back on soon enough to catch the family deploring the idea that Alexis was a thief. ‘Maybe this was just the universe sending a wake-up ...”

“... accounts, spend much time alone there. Badovici was a heavy drinker and a womaniser: factors that may have had less to do with their eventual split than his more general need for company and the intrusion into their life together of the architect they both revered. Le Corbusier had admired Gray’s unrealised projects, and now became a regular visitor to ...”

“... been anointed by the media and Italy’s chatterbox prosecutors as the capo della mafia. Decades may have passed since my childhood in Palermo but it’s as improbable as ever that its chief would be a rustic outlaw. The evidence that proves the continuity of high-level leadership begins with Salvatore ‘Totò’ Cuffaro, until January 2008 president of the ...”

“... Is Possible are set in a different small town, this time in Illinois. Characters and stories may escape to New York – following Strout’s trajectory in adult life – but they usually find themselves drawn back to their rural origins. And the closely knit weave of connected lives in her work isn’t merely a formal device, it represents the nature of ...”

“... inspired an international anti-apartheid movement. The ANC and other South African organisations may have approved of armed struggle – which the PLO renounced in 1993 – but many of the tactics used to challenge apartheid were non-violent. A Palestinian Freedom Charter modelled on South Africa’s would be a promising start. The parallels are not ...”

“... in Housmanesque poetry: ‘’Tis only right you look to wed/Now you are grown and gone/And I may comfort me to think/The lads come on and on.’ The sexual availability of ostensibly heterosexual young men was as remarkable as Steward’s appetite – he doesn’t record being attacked, or even that his targets recoiled from his advances. This he put ...”

“... Macaulay’s words, to ‘exact from [them] a promise that he will put a Veto on laws which [they] may hereafter think necessary to the wellbeing of the country’. In fact, the debates of the Convention Parliament show that the politicians of the day were seeking to fetter the King in his executive capacity – that is to say, to prevent him behaving like ...”

“... Shia and Christians was let out to Sunnis, ensuring that money kept coming in, and tax revenue may well have exceeded revenue generated from black market oil sales. IS was not weighed down by religious strictures about markets. On the contrary, the ‘Principles in Administration’ declare the need for ‘a comprehensive administration of collective ...”

“... 1. The concept of sovereignty may refer to the political control that a leader exercises over a society and territory, or the psychic control that an individual exercises over herself. 2. Sovereignty has a long history in political thought, not least in relation to the expansion of European imperial powers. But it was in Spanish America that its modern form – applied to non-imperial or non-colonial nation states – was first put into effective use as a diplomatic norm ...”

“... to the Government of the Netherlands for the surrender to them of the ex-Emperor in order that he may be put on trial. The issues that leap from every line of Article 227 are tracked by Schabas as they were wrangled over by states with histories, lawyers and agendas of their own. Was the offence of which the Kaiser now stood accused a crime known to national ...”

“... Fatty food is tasty. Oils are rubbed into the skin for pleasure, relaxation and healing. They may also act as a medium to connect the body with a realm beyond the corporeal. The British monarch is anointed at the coronation to signify the sacred nature of monarchy and its place as part of a divine order. In the Catholic Church, Supreme Unction at the ...”

“... and swiftly recover. But they become carriers all the same, infecting others, some of whom may belong to the unlucky 1 or 2 per cent – there is great dispute about the fatality rate among victims of Covid-19 – who will feel the virus’s full destructive impact. Methods of combating the two viruses are similar: when the queen visited Australia ...”

“... about climate change and mass extinction feed fears of imminent catastrophe. These uncertainties may help to explain historians’ current preoccupation with temporality. Yet in his conclusion, Clark reminds us that the fear of apocalypse is itself cyclical, and finds in Emmanuel Macron a figure not unlike the Great Elector, for whom solidarity between the ...”

“... to prevent such a passage falling beneath foreign control. The relevance of all this to Mars may be tangential, in a century’s time maybe not. An age might have to elapse before there can be any returns on capital in the form of scarce minerals in minable quantities, the costs of whose transportation alone might nullify their value. For the foreseeable ...”