“... be triggered, or even inherited. I cannot even look at a bevel, my mother has told me hauntedly. Lewis Carroll saw a pack of playing cards, but he might have seen the Supreme Face. What happens when the phenomenon has a name, an explanation? If the state can be entered through the physical: through repetition, the fondling of beads, looking at a bevel, what ...”

“... such fervent advocates of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby. The Lobby ...”

“... makes sense if one posits – as I would myself – that, directly or indirectly, valuation, which Paul de Man has called ‘the critical act in its most naive form’, is the only thing that criticism is concerned with. Kermode’s way of reviving the issue of literary value, as a matter of canons and the politics of canons, is valuable and suggestive, but it ...”

“... The Seven Per Cent Solution. Many American and British novelists, from Truman Capote to Piers Paul Read, have taken on the non-fiction thriller. But the benefits of fictional devices to serious non-fiction, from the days of André Maurois’s romanticised version of Shelley to Norman Mailer’s pastiche of Marilyn Monroe, have seemed more dubious. With ...”

“... Harvard law school professor Archibald Cox. It was picked up in 1978 by the conservative Justice Lewis F. Powell in the Supreme Court’s first plenary encounter with affirmative action in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Powell, in a pivotal decision, embraced the diversity rationale while rejecting all other justifications for racial ...”

“... preoccupations. But no one has yet given Bunche the kind of magisterial treatment David Levering Lewis gave Du Bois. In his new book, Kal Raustiala, who concentrates on Bunche’s work at the UN, admits that he hasn’t done it either. (Writing this essay, I have drawn on all three biographies and on Henry’s edition of Bunche’s writings.) Bunche is a ...”

“... confront her demons, Hani visited Waluś several times in prison; she had already met Clive Derby-Lewis, the ‘mastermind’ behind the killing, who provided Waluś with the gun. She had, she writes, been living in a ‘shroud of death’. In the years after her father’s murder her first serious boyfriend died after accidentally crashing his car into a ...”

“... it to Pennsylvania, which was probably just as well. (In his shaggy-dog history of ideas, Madoc, Paul Muldoon imagines the high-minded debacle that would have ensued had they ever got there.) Fiery Southey grew cooler and cooler. He began by suggesting that the party might perhaps work up to the full American dream by way of a small farm in Wales (Coleridge ...”

“... Twenties he had been especially impressed by the American band of Ted (‘Is everybody happy?’) Lewis, as well as by the famous British band led by Jack Hylton – light, happy, swinging big-band jazz, now given a Russian accent. The idea of The Happy Guys had originally come from Boris Shumiatsky, then deputy president of the State Committee on Art ...”

“... Jarman made a note in his diary in April 1989: ‘Since autumn: Terry, Robert, David, Ken, Paul, Howard. All the brightest and best trampled to death – surely even the Great War brought no more loss into one life in just 12 months, and all this as we made love not war.’ In March 1992: ‘We talked of the people who died of Aids this week.’ ‘To ...”

“... her radical beginnings as they did, Dame Iris’s spiritual journey not all that different from Paul Johnson’s.10 February. At Christmas G. and R. gave me a subscription to This England (‘Britain’s Loveliest Magazine’), which at first seemed a conventional magazine of the countryside with thatched cottages, country houses and even Patience ...”

“... thought about this for some time but my thoughts were focused when I saw Isabelle Huppert in Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 film, Elle. The film begins with a rape about which the victim, Huppert, is ambivalent. This sent the critics, particularly male critics, scuttling to and fro wondering whether it was a feminist, post-feminist or anti-feminist film, or ...”

“... were in cahoots, Belloc added a layer of antisemitism. Like his hero the writer and politician Paul Déroulède, Belloc felt France had been unbearably shamed by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and wanted revenge against the compromisers and financial interests that had undermined army morale. A thoroughgoing anti-Dreyfusard, he merged conspiracy theories ...”

“... account of muscular and gestural movement, frame by frame, as we find it in Wyndham Lewis, early Peter Weiss, the Beckett of Watt (the turn of the century Germans even had a word for it: Sekundenstil)? But it is not analytic; it does not break conventional gestures, conventional acts and names (‘I took a carton of milk’) into the ‘neural ...”