“... time the lonely outsider commemorated by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and (more cannily) Wordsworth. David Fairer maintains that their Wertherisation of Chatterton’s alleged suicide concentrated the Romantic poets’ minds on their own social isolation, on the necessary dissidence of the poet’s task and the short time reserved for its performance. Chatterton ...”

“... time, nothing much seemed to be happening, but then in January the lead counsel to the inquiry, David Barr KC, who has been plodding through the evidence since 2015, made a submission about the role of SDS’s senior management. He focused on a simple question: what was the justification, as understood at the outset, for the infiltration by undercover ...”

“... people saw in the ‘Yes’ campaign. Instead, they were trying to get things back to normal.When David Cameron emerged from 10 Downing Street after the referendum to announce a policy of ‘English votes for English laws’, the scales tipped. One of Bennie et al’s interviewees recalls that Cameron ‘thought Scotland was back in its box. We remembered ...”

“... printing-presses; the wounded are nursed back to health. Rabelais came to see joyful laughter as a means of comforting the sick in body and the sick in soul. In this way he reconciled his twin vocations of priest and doctor. Dr Rabelais, like Father Rabelais, comforts the afflicted. A Platonising bishop held that the surname Rabelais, by mystical Hebrew ...”

“... be cut. Or a future government could choose to abolish them, as the radical free marketeers of David Lange’s Labour Party did when they came to power in New Zealand in the 1980s. Many British farmers support Brexit. Others fear it would destroy them. The National Farmers Union has come out against, arguing that without subsidies, most British farms would ...”

“... Kraus notes with much perception, ‘was selective and punitive, as it often is in families of means’.) As well as Karen – who at some point became Kathy – the Alexanders produced a younger girl, Wendy, who isn’t mentioned in Kraus’s list of sources. ‘An unimportant torment,’ Acker called her in Great Expectations. ‘My sister … is the ...”

“... two enterprising brothers Francis and George Moult. In the early 1690s, Nehemiah Grew invented a means of deriving salt from the ‘spa waters bubbling up in the outskirts of London’, long known to have healing properties, and set up a factory for the production of what came to be known as ‘Epsom salt’. The Moults initially tried to buy the recipe from ...”

“... light, but Leahy seems reluctant to pursue them. For him, the ‘intelligence war’ essentially means the infiltration of the IRA, not the abuse of intelligence by agents of the British state who colluded with loyalist paramilitaries in attacks on republicans. He doesn’t mention Gary Haggarty, a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force and a paid police ...”

“... wanted tends to get lost in a professional ‘linguistic ambiguity’, to borrow a phrase used by David Ottaway in the Washington Post. Crocker writes that he wished to prepare for peace. The effect of what he did was to guarantee war. Large parts of Angola were ravaged in the period following Crocker’s success in making peace. Here was a dominant ...”

“... have installed the entire radical menu at the centre of their humanities curriculum.’ This means, does it, that the works of Lenin and Mao Tse Tung are mandatory for all incoming students at Yale, Harvard, Chicago and hundreds of other colleges in America? Kimball might be able to find a handful of examples (Frantz Fanon being on the ‘Culture Ideas ...”

“... like J.A. Hobson and soft socialists like R.H. Tawney. They may not all have willed the means proposed by Beveridge and Keynes (though an increasing number of them did) but most of them willed the end. They implemented the plans of their Labour masters not only dutifully but often with enthusiasm. It is most improbable, to put it no more ...”

“... them. Peasants are beaten up. ‘Scorched earth’ methods are applied. Starving the guerrillas means starving villagers, who are herded into camps. Misery spreads further. A Makerere University academic has just been out west to collect his father. This man of 80 was farming near Kasese. Rebels passed by a few miles away. Other human beings rippled away ...”

“... readily deployable,’ he said. ‘Our military must be able to identify targets by a variety of means, then be able to destroy those targets almost instantly … We must be able to strike from across the world with pinpoint accuracy … with unmanned systems.’ Bush was taking his cue from a concept known as the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’. The ...”

“... history – a moment reached on 20 July 2019, when he recorded 4876 days (exceeding the record of David Ben-Gurion). Netanyahu began the interview by boasting about the extent of American popular support for Israel. Citizens accosted him on trips across the US, hardly any of whom, he insisted with pleasure, were Jews. The subtext was that anyone in their ...”

“... That calls the child with white ideas of swans    Nearer to that green lake Where every paradox means wonder. The Mallarméan subject, though more accessible than in ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’, is every bit as immobilised; notice in the following lines Merrill’s ‘always’, the bell-jar dropped over the paralysed moment: Always ...”