“... For many years​ I held certain assumptions about Larry McMurtry. Without ever having read his novels, I thought of him as a prolific – perhaps excessively prolific – author of sentimental bestsellers, most of them sequels or prequels to earlier successes. I knew that a few good movies had been adapted from his work, but had mentally classified him alongside Sidney Sheldon, Colleen McCullough and John Jakes, writers of great popular appeal in my youth, whose moment had passed and whose work was unlikely to be revisited ...”

“... Americans, ignored by whites’?Her book appeared in the US just as Covid began to take hold. Donald Trump blamed China, the Chinese, and Asians in general; many of us who look ‘Chinese’ began to fear reprisals more than getting sick. Shopowners in New York’s Chinatown reported a 70 per cent drop in business even before Trump started talking about ...”

“... Cannibalism and the Common Law was that it went much wider than the one earlier book on the case, Donald McCormick’s Blood on the Sea, trawling in great social and nautical circles and retrieving wonderful things. Simpson’s new book on wartime internment in Great Britain does the same, with the deliberate result that the historic case which internment ...”

“... pawky Kelman device: he’s subverting our assumption that manual workers don’t read theoretical texts. Of course the man’s mates take the piss. Jake, who ‘has an inquisitive mind’, asks him what the book’s about. After hearing a sample, he remarks, ‘You read this stuff a lot dont ye?’ and the ...”

“... voices. In ‘January’, one asks: ‘Mommy what’s this fork doing?/What?/It’s being Donald Duck.’ Domestic conversation blends into a kind of surrealism whose hectic music mimics the rhythms of family life. Voices interweave. ‘Edmund. Edmund. Edmund. Maaah. Lodle lodle lodle.’ Many of the poems reflect on the ‘radical bodily change’ of ...”

“... criminals of all kinds. We are taking Mexico’s problems.’Women Trump: ‘Love him or hate him, Donald Trump is a man who is certain about what he wants and sets out to get it, no holds barred. Women find his power almost as much of a turn-on as his money.’The Morally Concerned Trump: ‘They asked me: “What do you think about waterboarding, Mr ...”

“... Listen to Jonathan Meades introduce and read this piece on the LRB PodcastAsneaked photograph​ from the earliest years of this century shows the teenage prodigy Wayne Rooney leading his parents out of the sea on a Mexican beach. They are about to move into an unknown world, where they will, all three, lurch from idolisation to easy prey, from objects of pity to mean-spirited envy – the adolescent has a gift, the elders have his blood ...”

“... in other European countries suggests no great distinctiveness is involved), there is no way to ‘read off’ political or other convictions from this feature of family background. A familiar form of lazy sociologism lurks beneath all amateur attempts to use class stereotypes to account for individual intellectual convictions. In any case, large numbers of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Throughout the time that he was Prime Minister Clement Attlee read only the Times. He was, he said, too busy to bother with other newspapers. The fact that the Times was firmly Tory and, after a few years of Labour Government, almost hysterically anti-socialist, didn’t worry him at all. ‘That’s what one expects,’ he said ...”

“... to acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of a contract’. By the time Donald Rumsfeld was sacked as US defense secretary, there were around 100,000 private contractors working for the US government in Iraq, more than ten times the number in the 1991 Gulf War. Although fewer than a third are in the security business, various US ...”

“... the very figure of a divided subject. Max Ernst, the most traumatophilic of Surrealists, read Freud in the original German and related the layering of his early collages to the working over of primal fantasies and other traumatic scenes. These images, which astonished the Surrealists-to-be when they were first shown in Paris in May 1921, provided the ...”

“... that. And perhaps this isn’t the sort of thing it’s worth worrying about in a thriller; I once read a novel by Robert Ludlum in which the hero gives his London cab driver a £100 note. Anyway, ‘a group of pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia separatists assaulted a ranch in northern Algeria where Suliman Cindoruk was believed to be hiding’ – huh? just roll with ...”

“... The title sounds like a novel, and the book can and should be read like one – a very remarkable one. Philip Larkin, who had the knack of making sideways critical comments as memorable as those in his verse, remarked that ‘the first thing a novelist must provide is a separate world,’ and it is true that the world Dr Green has made out of the relationship of Mark Pattison and Meta Bradley is not exactly a separate world ...”

“... without polemical side-glances, he can be perfectly lucid and explicit, indeed a pure joy to read. When he takes a stand on current controversies, he tends to be cryptic and elliptic, briefly marshalling a series of arguments which are rarely elaborated to the extent that would have been necessary to make them persuasive. Moreover, he never engages in ...”