“... Detroit criminals, slick Ordell Robbie and brooding Louis Gara, whom we’ll later see exiled to Florida in Rum Punch. Here they’re greenhorns, hapless petty criminals on the cusp of their first major caper, a kidnapping. A local businessman, Frank Dawson, is running a real-estate scam that involves renting apartments to pimps and sex workers. The tenants ...”

“... poems. His work exhibits little of the ostentatious virtuosity of better-known formalists such as Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, with whom he is so often, and rather unfortunately, grouped. Rather, Justice’s poems delicately induce the hypnotic state that Bishop described as her artistic ideal in a letter to Anne Stevenson: ‘What one seems to want in ...”

“... appears in several paintings like spilled guts). In a Pop move pioneered by Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, Rosenquist juxtaposes various bodies as if to imply that different fetishisms, sexual and commercial, have merged in postwar culture. He captures in paint a new imagistic version of the old capitalist condition in which the human appears ...”

“... disappears when you look inward. The chaos within is one of the major themes in the fiction of Richard Ford. What engages him is the churning of the conscious self, as changeable as the weather on an iffy day. What kind of a day is such a day? Soft or threatening? What kind of people were Ford’s mother and father, whose inner lives might offer strong ...”

“... by the loos plaintively reads: MIAMI, 4378 MILES —>.) The ethnography of Hooters culture by ‘Richard Baldwin’ – one of the collaborators’ pseudonyms, actually the borrowed name of one of their friends, a 71-year-old former champion bodybuilder and emeritus professor of the humanities at Gulf Coast State College – is full of quiet, plausible ...”

“... two Aedes aegypti in Mexico’.) An eradication programme started in 1964 in Texas and southern Florida, but little enthusiasm was shown by politicians, public health professionals or the public: the money, they said, could be better spent. The programme was finally brought to an end after the election of Richard Nixon, a ...”

“... third volume of Charles Moore’s Thatcher biography, and I would urge anybody who likes a bit of Richard II with their morning coffee to read the last two hundred pages straightaway. Thatcher’s downfall, we know, was a coup de théâtre if ever there was one, but the book is also very telling about the duplicity of certain friends and the trauma of lost ...”

“... bloody escapes; middle-class students planted bombs and robbed banks. In August that year, Richard Nixon took a break from a four-day conference on crime control to address reporters. His subject was the spell that outlaw behaviour had apparently cast on the youth of America. In a characteristically sideways rhetorical manoeuvre, he began with a ...”

“... their home airfield when the undercarriage gave way on landing. When the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richard talks dismissively about ‘Brabazon bands’ he is alluding to an ill-fated post-war British airliner. A rock band can be beautiful to look at, sound as sleek and smooth as you like, the gnarled Richard is saying, but ...”

“... Brighton had several, and became the epitome of the beach. ‘You hear nothing and see nothing,’ Richard Jeffries wrote of Brighton’s beach in The Open Air (1885): It is perfectly comfortable, perfectly jolly and exhilarating, a preferable spot to any other. A sparkle of sunshine on the breakers, a dazzling gleam from the white foam, a warm sweet ...”

“... be unaffected by your failure to show up, even if you happen to live in a swing state like Ohio or Florida. If Obama is winning the state, he will do perfectly well without you; if he is losing, there is nothing you can do to help him get over the line, because the winning line will always be further away than your paltry individual vote. Either way, you are ...”

“... in Colorado, farmer in Kansas, hotel proprietor and orange-grove owner and mail carrier in Florida’, as the historian Steven Watts records it, before five more cross-country moves in Walt’s lifetime. The son was made to earn money for the family, carrying newspapers, selling on the railroads, even peddling butter to his rich ...”

“... last section, he impulsively high-tails it out of Haddam and ends up in a rented condo in Florida, all plans on hold. Will he be a sportswriter again? ‘I haven’t the slightest idea.’ Yet Frank is not gloomy. Despite his acknowledged efforts ‘to deflect the pain of terrible regret’ through improbable actions, he makes the most of things. He ...”

“... player. Here she meets the dweeby, good-hearted Walter Berglund and his charismatic best friend Richard Katz, lead singer and guitarist of art-punk band the Traumatics. Richard loves Walter because of his moral seriousness; Walter loves Richard because everyone does, including ...”

“... star reporter on the Miami Times. Jack self-destructs in his first year at the University of Florida, returning in shame to the narcotic routines of his father’s home in North Florida, driving a delivery truck for the Moat County Tribune, his father’s newspaper. Ward, too, disappears into his work, into ...”