“... Madison Square Garden there were hundreds of police wielding plastic handcuffs. Above the crowd, Fox News was advertising itself and its advertisers on a giant screen. The protesters howled up abuse as they passed underneath. A certain mica sparkled through the atmosphere of the Republican National Convention: it was the notion that a lack of patriotism was ...”

“... as absurd as the old knight – that if Becker is an ‘old wolf’ then Lawrence is a young fox. The passage is comic because of the overstatement, as if ‘naked liberty’ could possibly be an adequate opposition to ‘security and bank-balance and power’. Stylistically, the passage is comic because it is built on contradictions: the two hate each ...”

“... and sports are by no means all boastful or complicit. The supreme text of recent years is James Fox’s account of Lord Lucan and his set, with their boffes de politesse. There is a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John Aspinall. Patrician insolence has quite often appeared to express a ...”

“... inquiries in London might damage his News Corp business in the US, where his holdings included the Fox TV network. He and his fellow directors stood to be prosecuted in the UK under the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and in the US under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Having covered up its activities for years, News Corp reached for the ...”

“... the Lamprey family in Surfeit of Lampreys, published 25 years earlier. (‘God bless my soul!’ Fox said. ‘Your memory!’) Even in Last Ditch (1977), it turns out quite casually that Julia Pharamond was née Lamprey. ‘“I think long ago you met some of my relations.” “I believe I did,” said Alleyn.’But for the most part, the world of the ...”

“... at one degree of separation from Donald Trump. He has been interviewed by Tucker Carlson on Fox News, and posted photos of himself with Donald Trump Jr, Nigel Farage and Alex Jones. He has received a warm welcome on some of the podcasts credited with helping Trump win over young male voters. After Trump’s inauguration, Tate tweeted that ‘The Tates ...”

“... has come to pass. His reputation still rests on the phrase ‘sudden sharp hot stink of fox’, and Birthday Letters, read at a distance of 27 years, contains too much careful positioning to really count as poetry. I do think the problem is that it is too careful, despite Hughes seeming to assume Plath’s Morse abandon, her acrobatic enjambments ...”

“... in seducing language, the illusions of love and the abominable trade of war’. Abraham’s son Richard became Burke’s best friend (Burke wrote sixty letters to him over five years), and the Quaker and Huguenot connections, both in Dublin and in Co. Cork (where Burke’s mother originally came from), are not to be underestimated. As for his Catholic ...”

“... of whom came from socially prominent families, assisted her.’ Her antics were widely discussed. Richard Avedon remembered her organising a photograph of a model in ‘a stiff wedding dress’. Having shouted for pins, Vreeland took one, ‘and walked swinging her hips down the narrow office to the end. She stuck the pin not only into the dress but into the ...”

“... administration in American history. Under microscopic scrutiny by the Republicans and Fox News, Hillary’s emails were the only scandal they could produce. They couldn’t even find some low-level bureaucrat who had used his government franking privilege to send out personal Christmas cards.) Dominated​ by the coming end of the world and its ...”

“... film Something’s Got to Give, suddenly disrobed on the set, at the studios of Twentieth-Century Fox. Just as she did so, there appeared a young man with a camera. On assignment for Life (expecting to take some pretty pictures of the actress in performance) his eyes nearly popped out of his head. Marilyn, he was alert enough to know, had not been ...”

“... Palgrave in Suffolk. She was a celebrity – Wedgwood produced a cameo of her, and she appeared in Richard Samuel’s painting The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain at the Royal Academy in 1779 – but involved herself in the obscure business of schooling with characteristic energy and intelligence: she liked the boys and did not sentimentalise them, and she ...”

“... Otley Chevin, too – or Rain, Steam and Speed. ‘Colchester, Essex’ (c.1825) Until the fox became the object of the chase in the mid-19th century, hares were as central to hunting as deer. ‘Of all the chases, the hare makes the greatest pastime and pleasure,’ wrote the anonymous 18th-century author of The Huntsman. According to Gaston ...”

“... hadn’t got into the black. In What It Takes (1992), a breathless work of campaign stenography, Richard Ben Cramer described the confession Biden made to his aides before deciding to run: ‘The debts – he went through his finances whole, the mortgages, the credit cards. He was into Visa, Amex for thousands.’The letter to his tenants appears in ...”

“... How does​ Shakespeare look, after #MeToo and Black Lives Matter? Scenes of sexual coercion, from Richard III to Pericles, have become more immediate. In Measure for Measure, Isabella’s predicament – should she agree to sleep with Angelo, corrupt deputy to the Duke of Vienna, in order to save her brother from execution? – gets audiences on her side ...”