“... their capes as ‘black friars’, as distinct from Franciscan ‘grey friars’ and Carmelite ‘white friars’. The monastery was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1538, whereupon its five-acre precinct became a prime piece of Tudor real estate. Chris Laoutaris’s Shakespeare and the Countess gives a remarkably detailed account of its residents in the ...”

“... Not unlike Les Diaboliques (which was quite as disturbing) in several ways, Psycho was a black and white, low-budget horror movie which for cheapness – in both senses – was filmed by a television crew, while being directed by the A-listed Alfred Hitchcock, by then responsible for huge and glossy Hollywood hits like Rebecca, To Catch a Thief and North by ...”

“... Sacco, who worked in PR, tweeted: ‘Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white!’ During the 11-hour flight, she became the number one trending topic on Twitter. ‘No words for that horribly disgusting, racist as fuck tweet from Justine Sacco,’ one person tweeted. ‘Fascinated by the @JustineSacco train wreck. It’s global and ...”

“... serving); Federer’s peacocking entrances to Centre Court (at the 2009 championships he wore a white and gold monogrammed safari suit to every match). Professional tennis requires extraordinary psychological capacities – obsessive focus, epic self-belief – so it would be surprising if the players at the top were perfectly well adjusted. Being motivated ...”

“... outlier. The old mad master of abstract expressionism, Hans Hofmann, had two successive shows at Sam Kootz’s gallery in 1958 and 1959, first of recent work in high colour, and second of paintings drawn from his long career, the retrospective (selected by Clement Greenberg) opening in the same month as Eight American Painters. Lee Krasner had a show of new ...”

“... in high-class soap operas like Upstairs, Downstairs. In Grosvenor Square today, the Uncle Sam who lords it over the west side is not some latterday Courtauld relative, but a very different creature altogether. Lady Bracknell might be mollified to learn that Mayfair retains its high status and exclusive reputation: but the riches and power to which it ...”

“... ones. You wouldn’t confuse Lerner’s voice or his plot structures with Jonathan Franzen’s or Sam Lipsyte’s or Benjamin Kunkel’s. But in moments of high capering, Ben and Adam can seem to be iterations of a collective character we’ve met in other novels of the last twenty years. As 19th-century Russians fight duels and gamble, late 20th and ...”

“... lifelike head of the Motion Picture Association of America – one-time former fixer in the LBJ White House, recently chair of the Hollywood summit to discuss ways of supporting the war against terrorism – curdled our blood twenty years ago with similar threats. ‘The growing and dangerous intrusion of this new technology is to the American film producer ...”

“... And she formed a corporate board ready to go to war with Quest and LabCorp: Henry Kissinger; Sam Nunn, who had served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; George Shultz, the former secretary of state, one of the begetters of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war; William Perry, the former US secretary of defence; James Mattis, Trump’s ...”

“... so badly burned that he wanted nothing to do with it. When he came under strong Congressional and White House pressure to start a new Red hunt in 1930, he argued that such a thing was strictly illegal – and since the agitators were mainly in the unions, wouldn’t it be better to hand the whole thing over to the Department of Labor? The project quietly ...”

“... or at least has done since 1913 – Bordwell offers us an illustration from a film called Red and White Roses, released in that year. Of course, not even Bazin was arguing that montage was all bad, or that films could or should abandon it entirely, and the idea that film history consists of battles between the two approaches is as rigid and unhandy as the ...”

“... a writer to tolerate even minor flaws.’Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ by Sam Slote, Marc Mamigonian and John Turner takes on board all the research and scholarship done since Don Gifford’s groundbreaking Notes for Joyce (1974, revised and republished in 1988 as Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman). It shows Joyce ...”

“... rubble of the Berlin Wall had been tidied away.In hindsight, four figures in particular stand out: Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, Murray Rothbard and Ross Perot. Francis was, and remains, a comparatively obscure figure in American conservative intellectual and journalistic circles. But he was decisive in introducing to mainstream discourse the racist ideas of ...”

“... was given to her artistic struggles by a stroke of good luck. She came to the attention of Sam McClure, the New York editor and reformist publisher, who liked her stories and published her first collection, The Troll Garden. This was the real beginning of her writing career. He employed her directly as well, and assigned her various muck-raking ...”

“... to Toronto, where she is picked up by a sponsoring relative who takes her to a blues party. A white neighbour complains at the din, and the West Indians insult and threaten him with the ‘Untarryo Human Right Commission’. The ‘racialists’, they explain, ‘owe us. And we going to collect.’ Another more spiteful story portrays a black ...”