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“... On​ 11 December 2006, Felipe Calderón, the president of Mexico, appeared on television dressed as a military commander and announced that he was ‘declaring war’ on organised crime. It was an unforgettable and grotesque gesture, which won him an invaluable spike in popularity. The news was unexpected: it was the first time his National Action Party (PAN) had used the militaristic liturgy of Mexico’s previous post-revolution governments ...”

“... The​ political commentator Iain Martin, who claims that he fled Scotland before the 2007 Scottish elections rather than live under an SNP-led government, wrote a few months ago in a blog for the Telegraph of a Treasury aide who’d said to him that ‘Alex Salmond wants to be William Wallace.’ ‘No,’ Martin corrected him ...”

“... without the traditional raids and kidnappings. I remembered Herzog’s creed, as reported by Bruce Chatwin: ‘Walking is a virtue, tourism is deadly sin.’ This stern Bavarian dogma, repeated over many mesmeric interviews, lectures and presentations, became a little threadbare, itself a form of cultural tourism. A brand statement. Almost a slogan for ...”

“... to the Scottish Parliament, it seems that devolution has soothed the nationalist itch. Yet, as Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan recognise in their study of the unionist political tradition, this still leaves unresolved the issue of what now underpins the British connection. For unionism, they argue, is now dead outside Northern Ireland. McLean and ...”

“... has been asked to do a new Oxford anthology, though the youngest poet in their extant volume, Iain Crichton Smith, is now a sprightly 68. Watson’s model is not the Oxford or the Penguin, but Hugh MacDiarmid’s Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry, first published in 1940 and reissued by Canongate in 1993. This was the first anthology of Scottish poetry ...”

“... the operatic scene, and only to be expected. In a deft piece of detective-work Rice (together with Bruce Alan Brown, a fellow musicologist) has uncovered two numbers of Da Ponte’s La scuola degli amanti among Salieri’s autographs in the National Library in Vienna. This is important because it confirms Costanze’s remark to the Novellos that Salieri’s ...”

“... yes, I think we’ve done awfully well, particularly the things I’ve been doing.’ And Iain Macleod then said: ‘Yes, well, I’ve done awfully well and we’ve all done very well indeed.’ Not all of his honourable friends were distressed when Gaitskell died. ‘It was as if a great light had come into the sky,’ sallied Dick Crossman, in ...”

“... but unresolved, beacons of high modernism, were succeeded by Dorn’s synapse-frying Lenny Bruce performance, long sections of which he read, at various English venues, to hypnotic effect. With his belief that all poetry was derived from either the Iliad or the Odyssey, siege or quest, Dorn sculpted Gunslinger from the cast of John Ford’s Stagecoach ...”

“... the threat of extradition to Spain, he was an invisible neighbour to veteran entertainers like Bruce Forsyth. By this point London is no longer walkable. And therefore no longer scrutable. Pavements disappear, traffic-calming bumps infuriate the entitled. The streets are not streets: they are too clean, too niche. When irritated, the wealthy threaten to ...”

“... Australia. At which point, they should turn to the poets. For just as the Songlines are, to use Bruce Chatwin’s image, ‘a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every “episode” [is] readable’, so the quick and shallow tracks of tourism retrace our oldest myths, revisiting ancient holy sites, seeking out a ...”

“... who were important to the Freeze generation. The names he mentions, especially Josef Beuys and Bruce Nauman, but also Robert Gober, Ashley Bickerton and Jeff Koons, certainly make sense when we look at much of the work on show in Sensation – although, naturally enough, everything that the Young British Artists (more affectionately known as YBAs) absorbed ...”

“... in February 1981 Sir John King was made chairman of BA, and suddenly – in the words of Bruce MacTavish, one of the civil servants who appeared with Lamont before the Select Committee – ‘it was “love that bird!” time.’ It was not that King was a visionary. He was not the sort of businessman who would ever have let his enthusiasm for a ...”