“... to descriptions of what she does, how she holds herself and the way she talks.Fatale should be read in relation to La Position du tireur couché (1981), translated as The Gunman, Manchette’s final néo-polar, whose protagonist is also an assassin. Martin Terrier is a contract killer who works for ‘the company’. The book’s title indicates ...”

“... to divert, to alter it.’ Bois also learned this approach directly from Jacques Derrida, whom he read in high school and met during his studies in Paris: ‘First overturn a hierarchical opposition, then dispel its binarism by the introduction of a new concept.’ Derrida commissioned the 21-year-old Bois to write an essay on Matisse, his first of several ...”

“... English voices’.Ironically, Anne Stevenson, we soon learn, had similar expectations: ‘I had read Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Henry James, and I expected England to be the book I always wanted to live in.’ But, Malcolm writes dryly, for Stevenson ‘England turned out to be another book altogether.’ Soon after the publication of Bitter ...”

“... from his mind?’ The point is not that Dodsworth does not have a coherent argument. When read more than once, the structure of his case reveals itself more clearly: connections between bodies, dead bodies and bodies soon to die; subtle routes by which the practice of honourable conduct is lost and then, degenerate but still noble, is represented and ...”

“... The answer is that it is an inept rendering of the sexual term jouissance in the translation by Richard Miller in which Anglophone readers regularly misread Barthes’s Plaisir du Texte, though it’s true that no single English word gives the full sense of ‘active pleasure’, with specific associations of orgasm, of Barthes’s usage. Barthes isn’t ...”

“... Two days before making this statement the President awarded the National Security medal to Richard Helms, the former CIA Director who had been fined $2,000 and given a two-year suspended jail sentence for lying to Congress.4 Casey himself has been awarded the CIA’s highest medal for bringing ‘imagination to our operation’.5 Reagan’s open ...”

“... the reader often has the opportunity of checking both their facts and their hypotheses. They have read widely and sometimes critically, and they even assure us that they have reached some of their more sensational conclusions with reluctance. The field they cover is vast, and there is one drawback of a work of historical detection on this scale from which ...”

“... death thirty years later. Some of these letters, edited (and in Gide’s case translated) by Richard Tedeschi, appeared in a recent edition of Salmagundi. Dorothy Strachey’s letters are strikingly similar to Olivia in language and attitudes: they show someone working, often on rather exiguous materials, to create a hero and, in doing so, a place for ...”

“... Howe has shown that he has the courage of Mr Healey’s convictions.’ Personally, I do not read British economic policy since the war as having been quite as single-mindedly obtuse as Pollard maintains. The weaknesses have been wider and deeper. Rather than continuity, Thatcherism represents a perverse reaction to a misreading of those weaknesses, all ...”

“... lushly ‘pagan’ and pastoral. Still, Reid is as much a part of the ‘Arcadian’ tradition as Richard Jeffries, author of Bevis, who does get in. Carpenter’s claims for the authors under consideraton, perhaps, are not always justified. However, his critical manner is in many respects exemplary: sharp, resourceful, diverting and illuminating. Dryness and ...”

“... to what Stephen Armstrong calls ‘DIY Dentistry’. In a chapter that’s almost impossible to read without flinching, Armstrong tells story after story of individuals forced by the scarcity of public services and the cost of private treatment into self-dentistry, sometimes aided by cheap off-the-shelf ‘kits’ for basic treatments up to and including ...”

“... had none of the self-involvement of (say) Alain Besançon, the humourless righteousness of Richard Pipes or Leonard Schapiro’s cold disdain. There was a jokey, blokey aspect to Conquest, a whiff of the Oxford debating society and student satirical review, that made him an anomalous figure in international Sovietology, which – apart from Abe ...”

“... they tend to concentrate on themes and characters rather than techniques or questions of language. Richard Eyre’s film Iris (2001) is well paced, well acted, and offers a moving portrait of Murdoch’s succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease. But there is no sense of the writer in the film. We just get the sprightly young woman, the honoured dame and the person ...”

“... Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie.’ The article was such a crunchy read, so stuffed with only-in-Hollywood anecdotes and luxury shopping specifics, that it upstaged the movie before its release. Sometimes with a Troubled Production, miracles happen in the editing suite, but this wasn’t one of those times. (‘The Canyons is ...”

“... voices; Salford’s city fathers complained that she was bringing their city into disrepute; Richard Hoggart, whose landmark study of working-class culture, The Uses of Literacy, had appeared the previous year, objected that Delaney’s characters were ‘not typical’ of the working class. Very tall, striking and photogenic, Delaney found herself ...”