“... or learn to use a ‘system of analytical reviews’ to assess his ‘behaviours’ in the light of the documented ‘social contract’. He is constantly being told that it is ‘an exciting time’ to be with the company, and bombarded with slogans: ‘To be a trustee is to be a forward thinker.’ Louse is a fairly short first novel and these shifts ...”

“... a great sex scene in the Presidential Suite of the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow. The events that came to light last week – when a dossier of intelligence reports surfaced online alleging Donald Trump’s eccentric sexual exploits, a long-running conspiracy between Trump and the Russian regime, and inappropriate financial deals ...”

“... Sam and Philip Chase, Malcolm, Roy Slater, Sean Harding, Steve Richards, Culpepper, Cicely Boyd, Donald, Claire and Miriam Newman, and Mr Plumb. And these are only some of the speaking parts. To try to summarise the plot would be like trying to summarise EastEnders. You couldn’t: you shouldn’t. The plot isn’t the point, so much as the stories, mood and ...”

“... and purist, a model of the poem as a hallowed speech-act, less likely to express itself in light verse than lyric, more likely to be let down by insensitivity than intensity. If Lowell and Alvarez influenced Hamilton’s sense of what comprised his natural subject-matter (love, marital tension, suicide, madness and the whole thing there), his ...”

“... and adapting them for the silver screen. As the song says: ‘Go out and try your luck/You may be Donald Duck/Hooray for Hollywood.’ America had always been a percentage play, and Hollywood was the fabulous embodiment of the nation’s faith in pluck and luck. To a society that fancied itself a Redeemer Nation, the bonanza of stars, paydays and lush life ...”

“... order – Wilfrid Sellars, J.J.C. Smart, David Armstrong, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Donald Davidson, Ruth Millikan, Patricia and Paul Churchland – one gets a clear sense of a developing consensus. There is increasing agreement about which moves will and won’t work, which strategies are dead and which still alive. Bad questions have been ...”

“... dream of urban ruin. I stopped one night in front of the Ferragamo shoe-shop on Fifth Avenue. The light from the shop was so strong it seemed like daylight spilling over the pavement. I felt drenched in the uncanny whiteness. And there in the window, draped on transparent mannequins or laid on silver boxes, were some of the dazzling relics of the late Marilyn ...”

“... of incipient talent – his classmates included Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery and Donald Hall – Creeley felt discouraged and alone. ‘My eager thirst for knowledge, almost Jude-the-Obscurian in its innocence, was all but shut down by the sardonic stance of my elders,’ he recalled. He left college in 1944 for non-combatant service, driving ...”

“... to be an American, Chris Shull, born in Philadelphia and raised in Maryland. In 1999, long before Donald Trump openly coveted Greenland, Shull was called to preach in a place where there were no Baptists, a place he knew nothing about. ‘I just started praying about a place where God would want me to go,’ he said when we sat down to talk the next ...”

“... by a distant prompting, I looked over the gunwale and saw beneath the surface a luminous room, a light-filled grave, saw for the first time the one clear place given to us when we are alone. Soliciting comparison with Thoreau on Walden pond, and Wordsworth o’er the side of his slow-moving boat, this composes in advance an MLA paper on ‘Strand and the ...”

“... post; back would come a list of inquiries from some studious editor. Were dates accurate, in the light of the latest research? Later, proofs would arrive, rewritten to fit in with house-style (as laid down in the Little Brown Book, constantly revised), sometimes to an infuriating extent. Were your changes really necessary, oh editors? Time will tell. It is a ...”

“... and chronicled the resulting ‘devastation’: his incompetence at bed-making, his inability to light the oven, the misery of his solitary meals. In the middle of reading one such bulletin, I rang the Taylors’ home to take his proof marks. Eva Taylor answered the phone: she was home and she was better. What had hospital been like? ‘Very interesting. But ...”

“... The cover was designed to shock, depicting a self-electrocuting naked man, plugged into a light socket and launched into the air in a foetal position. Addressing itself to ‘flipped out flower kids’, Zap proselytised for marijuana and introduced Crumb’s irascible Old Testament guru, Mr Natural. News stands and bookshops were afraid to carry ...”

“... for the intending biographer of Palmerston. He was born before the American constitution saw the light, and lived to see the Great Republic’s civil war: among statesmen of the first rank, only Gladstone and Churchill have exceeded his elephantine span as an MP, but he surpassed them both in the number of years he held office. For some of his public ...”

“... Stefan Collini has made his reputation as the historian of late 19th-century sociological thought. Donald Winch has long been known for path-breaking studies of the Smithian and Keynesian epochs. John Burrow’s elegant anatomy of the evolutionary paradigm in Victorian Britain has recently been succeeded by a rightfully acclaimed historiographical work. Though ...”