“... his autobiography. LaHaye himself is the patriarch of Christian Conservatism. A product of Bob Jones University, he has founded innumerable pressure groups. In 1979, he founded the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell; he has headed the American Coalition for Traditional Values; and had close connections with the Reverend Moon’s Unification Church (when ...”

“... to believe that their personal details won’t be handed on to the authorities. When Johnson Jones Hooper wrote about his experience of ‘Taking the Census in Alabama’, he signed it ‘by a “Chicken-Man” of 1840’ – a reference to the common belief that his job was to identify (for tax purposes) every chicken, cow and loom. A hundred years ...”

“... with defunct machines that were meant to better us, in more senses than one. The American engineer Ralph Mosher, we learn, ‘introduced additional features to make [robots] more lifelike and to give them a capacity for error, typical of human actions’. To this end, he worked on machines that were tied to the human nervous system, to replicate the logic of ...”

“... of a myth, but it helped to vilify them) – to the minor fiddles of a figure like Lance Corporal Jones, the elderly butcher in Dad’s Army who slips the buxom Mrs Fox a couple of sausages on the side. (In his LRB Diary for 2002, Alan Bennett cited a letter from a Grantham evacuee reporting the rumour that Alderman Roberts was ‘thought to be into the black ...”

“... that his father had lost his campaign to become a Texas senator in 1964 to ‘a better man’: Ralph Yarborough, unlike Bush Senior, had supported the civil rights legislation. Coffin’s remark stung. As Weisberg writes, George W. never forgot it, or the reason his father lost that election. George H.W. Bush had been ‘preppie-baited by a more authentic ...”

“... was marked last year by the publication of a good biography, The Lives of Robert Ryan by J.R. Jones, and a retrospective series at Anthology Film Archives in New York, which screened a few of his films under the title ‘An Actor’s Actor’.* In his last years, Jones says, he got the delayed recognition of a plaque ...”

“... was the impetus given to the careers of black authors: Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were given their first chance by the FWP. Its ambition was to create – or rather to discover – a great American epic in the acts and words of ordinary men and women: to draw from the disregarded speech and customs of the people the underlying ...”

“... or ‘Right’ Parisian category, she instructs him about ecology and conservation (‘The name of Ralph Nader is little-known in France ...’) and the malevolent influence of television and advertising (‘I don’t need salesmen coming into my house to hawk their wares ...’). He asks: ‘Would you go so far as to outlaw advertising? In that kind of ...”

“... their first date, they haven’t kissed yet and they don’t have the exchange about the meat. Ralph Fiennes, looking bored over their steak and onions, says to Julianne Moore: ‘I’m in love, you know.’ She, equally wooden, tells him that she is, too. (Moore, who can be very good, seems to be concentrating so hard on her accent that she forgets to do ...”

“... where no sun shines;/Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart/Push in their tides,’ Glyn Jones, a sceptical friend, ventured that it ‘probably expresses something pretty trite and commonplace, in prose terms, about the foetus and the pre-natal state’. That puts it harshly, but Jones was shrewd to pick up on the ...”

“... and in doing so reinforces an overall sense of necessity. The Portrait of a Lady tells us that Ralph Touchett accompanies Henrietta Stackpole to look at the pictures in the long gallery of his father’s country house the day after they have been boating together, but we know that it could have been three days later, or five. The time is specified simply ...”

“... at one time or another included Buck and his wife, Blanche, and various friends and associates (Ralph Fults, Henry Methvin, W.D. Jones) – was intensely family-minded. When they wanted to arrange a family gathering, Clyde and Bonnie would drive past the old Barrow home in West Dallas and toss out Coke bottles in which ...”

“... mother, a young woman from Chicago, and befriended a handsome doctor’s son called Prince Jones, whose untimely death at the hands of the police functions as the moral fulcrum of the book. Coates then writes of his early years of struggle as a freelance journalist, but says little of his subsequent triumphs at the Atlantic, where since 2008 he has ...”

“... Christopher Hassall was asked to write the authorised biography in part because, as Nigel Jones notes in his own biography of Brooke, Hassall’s lengthy Life of Eddie Marsh had managed ‘to avoid the topic of his subject’s homosexuality’ and he could therefore be relied on to be discreet. (It’s unfair to say that Hassall doesn’t tell the ...”

“... and yearning sense of what literature does for us. Strong and characteristic essays by Emrys Jones and Rachel Trickett draw clear critical lines around, respectively, Dryden as translator of Lucretius, and a Stiltrennung between descriptive modes in 18th-century prose and verse. Apt to the commemorative theme is a rather gentle, musing discussion by Mary ...”