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“... also came from that environment. Peter Orszag, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, William Daley, Michael Froman, Jason Furman and Jack Lew were all finance-to-government mediators of this stamp. Trump, however, gives up all pretence of a distinction between finance and government. A possible reaction is delight, as at an honest revelation. A later reaction ...”

“... elected in 1982, long before that distant nirvana of ‘fifteen, ten years ago’ described by Michael Fallon, when trying to touch up young female researchers, lobby correspondents or political activists was ‘acceptable’, just harmless ‘flirtation’. Some male MPs believe they still live in that era; while one insisted that it ‘absolutely does ...”

“... element of Zoroastrianism; and not only is Koresh, meaning Cyrus, the name of the Zoroastrian king of the Persians who found his way into Jewish prophecy as the man responsible for the reconstruction of the temple in Jerusalem; but the entire struggle between the Branch Davidians and the American state must have been viewed, on at least one side, as the ...”

“... compressed three vertebrae but never lost consciousness. My English professor and mentor, the poet Michael Heffernan, was first down the stairs and out the door to where I had landed. I must have appeared somewhat dazed and breathless. ‘Did you hit your head?’ he kept asking once he had determined I was alive. ‘What day is it?’ ‘Who is the President ...”

“... is a sympathetic sense of the man, and an analysis of his political style, that of the Biblical ‘king-priest’ of a secular church. It was, however, even more marked by a pragmatism akin to O’Connell’s, and a repudiation on de Valera’s part of his militant Republican past, except (ambiguously and dangerously) as one ingredient in a finely-calculated ...”

“... eaten in it. But we’re talking about writing and reading here. To an audience familiar with the King James Bible, the word ‘wilderness’ is rich with associations – among them, the idea of spiritual regeneration following a season of deprivation. It is in this wider context of initiation – the ritual of a passage through an ordeal into a higher state ...”

“... spin doctor, as a political consultant to write hymns in praise of his once and future king in the leader columns. The paper was repeating a giddy pattern set in the autumn. On 28 October Matthew Parris, the politician turned journalist, said in passing to Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight that Mandelson was gay. He wasn’t breaking a confidence: the ...”

“... a phase of ‘improving’ the imperfect Shakespeare, as for example in Nahum Tate’s version of King Lear, which allowed Cordelia not only to survive but to marry Edgar – a much more ‘satisfying’ result. And the 19th century produced one of my favourite ‘prequels’, Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, which offered the ...”

“... homosexual – passion, it simply doesn’t exist in Walker’s universe. For example, neither King Ludwig II of Bavaria (Wagner’s patron) nor Camille Saint-Saëns (Liszt’s protégé), both of whom were notorious queens, comes across that way. In a weird way, Walker’s three volumes can be reduced to a laundry list of Lisztian corrections. He was not ...”

“... But the notion that a friendly press can deliver votes has never been very convincing. Cecil King wasn’t the first person to see that newspapers could accelerate or slow up a trend, but never reverse or create one. The popular press, as Koss notes, encouraged a volatile public opinion which it could provoke and stimulate but seldom guide once the ...”

“... the literary agent, who is the dedicatee of Duffy. Harder to crack is the pseudonymous code of Michael Crichton, the omnicompetent ‘movelist’. (He is author of The Andromeda Strain, director and producer of Coma, director and scriptwriter of Westworld.) Crichton stands six feet seven inches tall. Two of his writing pseudonyms are ‘John Lange’ and ...”

“... of many colours by the water’s edge, my mother has many garments of gold,’ the Erlking, or King of the Alders, calls out, luring his prey into the depths of the forest. The child riding with his father through the windy night immediately recognises the voice of the Erlking, and cries out. But his father reassures him: ‘In dürren Blättern säuselt ...”

“... chance that the North could become the South. The people of Yorkshire, by spurning the advances of King David I, might have deprived us of a much more interesting island.This is not just medievalist quibbling. The imbalance between the North and Scotland has been fundamental to Britain’s evolution. In 1977, the leaders of Tyne & Wear and Merseyside county ...”

“... time he learned of the double trial, he had already had four clandestine meetings with the son of Michael Taylor, a former Green Beret who specialised in springing wealthy people out of tricky situations in foreign countries, and an escape plan was largely in place. A few days later it went into effect. Retracing the steps of Taylor’s team on Ghosn’s ...”

“... Blanchard, John Jeffries, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and James Sadler, the balloonists; in King George III, who loved telescopes and music and balloons; in Thomas Beddoes, the doctor, and his Pneumatic Institute, and his wife, Anna; in Michael Faraday, the physicist; in Charles Babbage, the mathematician and inventor ...”