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“... that little had changed. (The book was published in Spanish in 1981; the English translation by Peter Bush comes out this summer.) As a landlord and his guests languorously discuss peasants and their lack of culture, he boasts that there are no illiterates among his tenants, and to prove it he invites some of them to the dining room to display their ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd has written a benign life of T.S. Eliot. Given the malignity visited on Eliot, this is a good deal. Fair-minded, broad-minded and assiduous, here is a thoroughly decent book. It has none of the sleazy sanctimony of Robert Sencourt’s biography, or the vanity of T.S. Matthews’. That it is a feat to be without spite is coincidentally manifested by the appearance of Geoffrey Grigson’s Recollections ...”

“... of political muscle? Take one of the best-known arguments in contemporary moral philosophy: Peter Singer’s attempt to prove that there is no ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ when it comes to suffering in a globalised world. Singer first made his case in 1971, in response to the humanitarian crisis in Bangladesh. The core of the argument is ...”

“... married and started dairy-farming – and yet even I was almost seduced by the myth of the alien bush, as I began learning to write poetry. A received sensibility almost had me subscribing to its agenda, in spite of my awareness that the bush wasn’t alien to me at all, but a deeply loved vastness containing danger and ...”

“... million – in the World Service budget. By the time it leaves its imperious headquarters at Bush House on Aldwych next year and moves into the renovated Broadcasting House on Portland Place, the World Service will have shrunk significantly, shedding language services, listeners, programmes, staff and frequencies. It lost ten of its language services in ...”

“... Queensland in the early 1970s was, according to the narrator of Peter Carey’s new novel, ‘a police state run by men who never finished high school’. This intriguing throwaway remark turns out to be not much of an exaggeration. For twenty years from 1968, Queensland was controlled by the corrupt, gerrymandering state governor Joh Bjelke-Petersen, variously described as the Hillbilly Dictator, a ‘bible-bashing bastard’ and – by himself – as ‘a bushfire raging out of control ...”

“... Tom McClintock, the inestimable Arianna Huffington and the former Baseball League Commissioner Peter Ueberroth. By no coincidence, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his candidacy – on the Jay Leno Tonight show – on the day Issa withdrew. It was clear from the outset that if a ‘No on Recall’ vote supporting Davis failed to pass by even a slight ...”

“... the idea of national security and the lurid crimes of Abu Ghraib. First, each of the reasons the Bush administration gave for going to war against Iraq – the threat of WMD, Saddam’s alleged links to al-Qaida, even the promotion of democracy in the Middle East – referred in some way to protecting America. Second, everyone agrees that getting good ...”

“... spilled over naturally into writing it: Garfitt went to informal workshops with John Wain and Peter Levi, heard Ted Hughes read at the Poetry Society. Coghill read his poems, but wasn’t very enthusiastic; Peter Jay took a photo of him in a green silk smoking jacket looking ‘just like Rupert Brooke!’; he talked ...”

“... to Kinsella, the meaning of the urban Australian’s nostalgia for ‘the centre (read: the bush)’ is ‘probably the prime debate of mid-Nineties Australian poetics, certainly among male poets’. Born in 1963, John Kinsella grew up in the Perth suburbs but he also worked on wheatbelt farms and sheep stations in the Avon Valley area, sixty miles west ...”

“... whose Cassandra-isms as head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit went unheeded by the Clinton and Bush administrations before 2001, is still trying to warn America. ‘No one,’ he writes, ‘should be surprised when bin Laden and al-Qaida detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States.’ Why? As Scheuer notes in Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is ...”

“... Paul VI, John XXIII’s liberal-minded successor, died in 1978, he was followed on the throne of Peter by Albino Luciani, Patriarch of Venice, a man so administratively inept that he chucked a sheaf of papers in desperation over the parapet of the apostolic palace, and was discovered by his secretary weeping in sheer terror of his cardinal secretary of ...”

“... only here for De Beers’) via James Goldsmith, Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch, to Mugabe, Bush and Blair. For fans of a pensionable age, Verwoerd’s assassination (‘A Nation Mourns’, 17 September 1966) is a star cover. Younger readers may prefer a ghoulish photo of Norman Tebbit, the Tories’ ‘New Caring Face’ in 1986, and his ...”

“... bombs planted by the IRA in two crowded Birmingham pubs, the Tavern in the Town and the Mulberry Bush, exploded, killing 21 people and injuring at least 170. Many of the injuries were life-changing. None of those responsible has been brought to justice. This month, almost 45 years later, an inquest opens into the deaths. The inquest has been forced on the ...”

“... always like that for him,’ the child mused when, in the film’s opening sequence, Peter Parker, Spider-Man’s ‘real’ teenage self, missed the school bus. In that one remark the child encapsulated what the director and producers had got so right in casting Tobey Maguire as the misfit character, and in their gentle faithfulness throughout ...”