“... the future that didn’t include him’): but this return for Thomas’s influential promotion of North of Boston lapsed after the latter’s death. The separation of Thomas and Frost along an Anglo-American dotted line distorts perspectives on early 20th-century poetry. A history so specific to poetry has been additionally marginalised by the Modernist ...”

“... in 1949; it’s the sound of William Burroughs waiting out a blizzard in a depot fifty miles north of Wichita. ‘Yes, that’s ol’ Junkie Bill, over by the stove there, just whittlin’ on his penis,’ says the station master, while Bill mumbles to himself:The buyer has a steady connection: the man within, you might say, or so he thinks. I’ll just ...”

“... microscope, he carved and painted sculptures measurable in microns and millimetres; his Pope John Paul IIholds a cross crafted from a hair divided into sixths, making its width slightly less than the diameter of two red blood cells. His portrait of Little Red Riding Hood, whose diminutive has never been so well-deserved, features a mere speck of a girl ...”

“... Americans, is close to hero-worship, treats FDR’s endless deceptions and tricks with indulgence. John Steinbeck, whom FDR once persuaded to do some spying for him in Mexico, came to the conclusion that he liked mystery, subterfuge and indirect tactics for their own sake. But maybe, like many privileged people, he didn’t see why the world shouldn’t be ...”

“... untrue. Marlene is not American; like Butcher, she is a provincial, from the tiny town of Benalla, north-east of Melbourne (where, it turns out, she burned down the high school). Dozy Boylan’s painting is not a major Leibovitz, but a canvas ‘completed’ in the 1940s after Leibovitz’s death by his second wife, and passed off as a great early ...”

“... nothing to the French defeat he immediately demanded that Italy be allowed to occupy France as far north as the Rhône valley, to annex Nice, Corsica, Tunisia and Djibouti, and to take over the French navy and air force. Hitler had other ideas: he wanted a lenient peace treaty in order to bolster Pétain’s position. The tougher the terms imposed on ...”

“... Among philosophers​ of the 20th century, John Langshaw Austin is not a cultural celebrity like Heidegger, Russell, Sartre or Wittgenstein. But for a period after the Second World War, he was the leading figure of the school of ordinary language philosophy that dominated Oxford, achieved substantial influence in the wider Anglophone world and left its stamp for a much longer time on the way analytic philosophers work, think and write ...”

“... of nothing but Israel”.’ During that trip to the Middle East in July 1953, he toured North Africa, Egypt and Jordan, speaking, as he put it, ‘to Sheiks, fellahs and bubble pipe salesmen’ along the way. It doesn’t seem, at least from the written record, that he talked to any Israelis. Israel had taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees ...”

“... these were the same German soldiers who went on to massacre whole villages as they withdrew to the north, I don’t know.When the Germans left, the family returned to Florence. In December 1944, Guido was arrested by the British and sent to a prison camp near Terni. I haven’t been able to determine what the exact charges against him were. Released in July ...”

“... a girl like you, the best novel of Amis’s earlier years. That previous heroine was, in theory, North Country English, and the hero’s sad grotesque friend a Thames Valley Scot. But the Welsh Rhiannon and her Malcolm (whom the end of the novel leaves not altogether unhappily putting his love into his translation of Welsh Medieval verse) are to all intents ...”

“... split the civilian élites that had hitherto supported it, as many of the landed notables of the North-East – the core of its system of political alliances – defected to the opposition. The military held off the pressure from the streets, but at the cost of losing control of Congress, where a ‘liberal front’ of retrograde landowners and local ...”

“... is a for-profit run by a military contractor, Caliburn International. The anti-immigrant zealot John Kelly – once considered the only ‘adult’ in the White House when he was chief of staff – joined Caliburn’s board immediately after leaving government.*In a televised interview with Vice President Pence, the host reads from an article about the ...”

“... about the exhibition also is the various views it has of Cumberland Market, the great horse-market north of Euston Road where the 1950s Regent’s Park estate now stands. It was bombed during the war, or so it’s always said, though it was probably recoverable and from the various drawings on show in the exhibition one can see how these days it might have ...”

“... political history this century, from Rufus Isaacs to Horatio Bottomley to Maundy Gregory to John Poulson, is littered with great corruption stories. The explanation for the increase in sleaze under Thatcher and Major is not to be found in any particular scandal, nor in the sudden susceptibility of certain individuals to corruption. Contemporary sleaze ...”

“... home-grown products that had nothing to do with the white man. The growing presence in Europe and North America of wave after wave of non-white immigrants added considerable animus to the tirades. The events of 11 September tipped the scales definitively. Oddly, from the 1980s, this process coincided with the rise of post-colonial studies in British and ...”