“... some perplexity’. A short time later Eliot and Mansfield met at a dinner party in Hammersmith (Robert Graves was also present) where, she wrote, Eliot ‘grew paler and paler and more and more silent’ while their host (whom she likened to a butcher) ‘cut up, trimmed and smacked into shape the whole of America and the Americans’. The two, he without ...”

“... in peacetime. A substantial package guaranteed the same percentage of wage income for most of the self-employed. There is probably more to come. In each announcement, Sunak has repeated the same mantra: ‘whatever it takes’.His calm and authoritative presentation has won him praise from those alarmed by Johnson’s shambling improvisation. Unlike the ...”

“... base except the archetypal white male rock critic. In mini hatchet jobs for the Village Voice, Robert Christgau declared war on ‘the enemy’. He situated Abba in the tradition of the advertising jingle and sniped that their ‘disinclination to sing like Negroes reassures the Europopuli’. The Anglo-American pop-rock canon had by then established ...”

“... are not among them. On the contrary, success in politics is a matter of rule-breaking and rampant self-interest, and power is exploited solely for personal enrichment. (A variant of this mentality manifests in online claims that Volodymyr Zelensky is a liar who wants more of British taxpayers’ money so he can build up his fleet of luxury cars.)Hilhorst was ...”

“... their subjects to believe that public policy is too complex or too boring a matter for ordinary self-respecting citizens to bother with: better to leave it in the benevolent, efficient hands of the technocrats. The avant-garde encourages this belief when it holds the mirror up to nature and reveals all the standard items in the avant-garde ...”

“... ostentatiously aspired – or in the control of the rising professional class with which Huxley self-consciously identified. Indeed, one of Desmond’s more tendentious moves is to suggest that Huxley was eventually won round to a sense of evolutionary progression precisely because it mirrored his own sense of social aspiration – as one of the community ...”

“... records or laying plans to snuff her out. Prominent among these writers are Milo Speriglio and Robert Slatzer (a bit of a cross-category-turn this last one: he claims to have been married to Monroe for three days). There is a new addition to this group, a hysterical book by Donald H. Wolfe which may just prove to be the conspiracy sub-genre’s reductio ad ...”

“... facial gymnastics, which in Moto were so pointless, are here used to show the murderer’s divided self. Lang – a sadistic director – pushed Lorre to his limits on set, forcing him repeatedly to redo a scene where he is kicked in the shins until he couldn’t walk for three days. As Beckert breathlessly laments the impossibility of escaping ‘from ...”

“... with big ideas for changing the world. The successful candidates were a bunch of mini-Thiels: self-styled libertarians, contemptuous of college and its pointless rituals. ‘They were – nearly all of them – boys,’ as Chafkin points out, ‘and, almost to a person, they shared Thiel’s social awkwardness.’ One 17-year-old was hoping to extend the ...”

“... a matter of months before the Corbett-Ashley case by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, who proposed the distinction in his 1968 study, Sex and Gender – the second volume was called The Transsexual Experiment. For Stoller, gender was identity, sex was genital pleasure, and humans would always give priority to the first (many ...”

“... of his country in the aftermath of the Nicaraguan earthquake. Winding it up came a warning from Robert Bork against the menace of the ‘clerisy of power’ now (under the Ford Presidency) steering the nation towards the shoals of equality and uniformity. The following bumper issue of the National Review, on 5 December, was mainly taken up with the text of ...”

“... to the power of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, he wrote: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’ In the years after James’s death, his family in the United States was concerned about his reputation, especially about what Edel ...”

“... of her. The recording comes from a film called Broadway Melody of 1938 in which Garland stars with Robert Taylor and Eleanor Powell. It was her first feature-length film for MGM. She had performed the song earlier that year at Gable’s on-set birthday celebrations: he was the studio’s biggest star. Garland made a surprise appearance at the party, posing as ...”

“... interviewees, a vivid picture emerges of the parsonage and its inhabitants: the literary (self-described) eccentric, Patrick, working on his sermons, agitating for local causes and eating his meals alone. Aunt Branwell – Elizabeth Branwell – who came to care for the children after the death of their mother, her sister Maria, and is remembered for ...”

“... this year’). He got an A in Metalwork, but the teacher couldn’t think of his name and wrote ‘Robert’ while telling him to keep up the good work. His form teacher, Mr Norman, said that ‘Ronnie’s attitude and standard of work is slipping. I hope that he takes note of what has been said to him recently. He is always pleasant and happy.’ Ronnie ...”