“... systematic coverage of either the more or the less academic literature where our recommendations may have been discussed. The system of criminal justice, by which I understand not only the procedures for dealing with suspects, defendants, and appellants, but also the principles on which those procedures rest, is a topic on which feelings can and often do run ...”

“... why did Bush embrace a lopsided militarising of America’s response to 11 September? Mann may have identified the most important reason. Dazzled by the US’s unquestioned military supremacy, the civilian hawks seem to have lost all realistic appreciation of what the military can and cannot do. The man with a hammer misinterprets every problem as a ...”

“... generals are said to have been horrified when Sargent opened Thayer’s valise. According to Richard Murray of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the prototype garment resembled an old hunting jacket, trailing strips of coloured cloth and daubed with patches of colour that reflected Thayer’s interest in harlequin costumes. It’s not clear whether ...”

“... is a necessary evil,’ Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses. In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann quoted Ivan Karamazov: ‘Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’ ‘From the Urals to Donegal,’ Ellmann writes,the theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland. George Moore, in his ...”

“... huge success, with both critics and audiences. ‘Oscar Wilde,’ the New York Times announced, ‘may be said to have at last, and by a single stroke, put his enemies under his feet.’ There is no evidence that Wilde went home to his wife and children on his return from Algiers: he seems to have remained in various hotels in London. Around 17 February he ...”

“... A little strange, that, I thought. But I said, ‘That’s where I’m going, so perhaps I may give you a lift?’ ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That’s very kind of you.’ And we got into the car and drove off. At first neither of us spoke. I was concerned with joining the stream of traffic in Lower Regent Street. Then he asked abruptly: ‘Are you ...”

“... a Mod, a hippy and a Buddhist; he’d called himself Davie Jones, David Jay and David Bowie (after Richard Widmark’s portrayal of Jim Bowie in The Alamo, though he pronounces it the southern English way, the first syllable rhyming with ‘snow’ rather than ‘shoe’ or ‘cow’). Whatever it took. One of the things Trynka’s biography makes clear is ...”

“... could not be heard and putting his hand over her mouth. Fox News calls her a ‘loon’ (‘She may very well believe everything she’s saying. That is one of the signs of lunacy, believing something that isn’t real’); Senator Orrin Hatch says she is clearly ‘mixed up’; Donald Trump Jr tweets a crude drawing making fun of her; if the assault ‘was ...”

“... many visits . . . have I found anyone about.’ The fact is, in Sebald nobody is ever about. This may be poetic but it seems to me a short cut to significance. 6 April, Yorkshire. The new organic shop in the village continues to do well, the walk down the lane to the Nissen hut always a pleasure even in the bitterest weather. There are sheep in the adjoining ...”

“... that the office was lenient to the powerful. ‘Infamous’ sodomites were fewer in number but may have persisted throughout adulthood, pursuing relationships with other adults or taking the passive role. Rocke gives an average age for those men of 39 as opposed to 27, and they often remained unmarried. It is clear that Florence was unusual, though it’s ...”

“... In large parts of the South blacks were kept from voting by intimidation and trick and murder. It may indicate the atmosphere if I tell you that the New York Times had great difficulty finding a lawyer in Alabama who would represent the paper in the Sullivan case. When one did agree to take the case, and he invited the Times’s New York lawyer down to ...”

“... early in 1984. Assad lived just long enough to witness the total Israeli retreat from Lebanon in May 2000. He was probably the only Arab leader to earn America and Israel’s respect, having inflicted defeats on both. And he left a son to prolong his legacy. For the men who came to rule the United States with the inauguration of George W. Bush, the Syrian ...”

“... What is the reward for knowing the worst?Donald Barthelme, Snow WhiteWhen Richard Rorty​ wrote, in one of his many familiar pragmatist pronouncements, that the only way you can tell if something is true is if it helps you get the life you want, it sounded either like a provocative assertion or another advertisement, masquerading as epistemology, for consumer capitalism ...”

“... lamentably titled ‘Rock’n’Roll Nigger’. This kind of earnestly meaningless rallying cry may be forgivable in the very young (or very stoned); Smith was 31 when it was recorded. ‘I’m pretty much unmanageable at this point,’ she claimed in a 2002 New Yorker profile. The same profile went on to detail a full itinerary of gigs and poetry ...”

“... inauthenticity and bad taste. Morton Feldman compared his ‘crazy colours’ to ‘Disneyland’. Richard Taruskin, an admirer, nonetheless derided his Turangalîla-Symphonie (1949) as a work of ‘sacroporn’, music which ‘perpetually skirts the fringe of kitsch’.The reasons Messiaen became such a ‘case’ were identified early on by Virgil ...”