“... Nixon and now columnist for the New York Times. He it was who, during the dismal days of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, came up with ‘Koreagate’, ‘Peanutgate’, ‘Billygate’ and – his own favourite, concerning some fiddle of government expenses – ‘Double Billingsgate’. In an interview with Eric Alterman for the latter’s excellent book Sound ...”

“... long before the Okies came to California. From the mid-Twenties onwards, Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family were recording songs about orphans, outlaws, disappointed love, homes left behind and nostalgically remembered – not to mention (though often forgotten) songs of hope and faith expressed in religious terms. Nicholas Dawidoff’s richly descriptive ...”

“... Lord Sommers loved Perry,’ Newcastle wrote with heavy underlining. Many​ of the letters in Stephen Bernard’s meticulous edition owe their survival to Tonson’s Victorian heirs, who began auctioning off the most saleable manuscripts in the 1870s, as the family fortune dwindled. The rump of the archive was pulped for newsprint during World War Two, as ...”

“... out his version of the complete Swann volume. This is the first part of a new translation of À la recherche du temps perdu, edited by Adam Watt. Nelson will also translate the last volume, but no announcement has been made about the intervening ones. Christopher Prendergast’s six-volume edition for Penguin (2002) is still in print and much read. The ...”

“... of O’Brian’s fictional heroes, Jack Aubrey, with the passion for natural history of another, Stephen Maturin. Moreover O’Brian’s accounts in his novels of 18th-century seamanship are, like Tolstoy’s battle pieces, better historical description than most historians manage: it was clear that the variety of incident in Banks’s voyage to the Great ...”

“... I met​ Carter Page. And who’s he? For anyone not up to speed with the endless comings and goings in Trumpworld, the Washington Post edition of the Mueller report provides a helpful guide to its teeming cast of characters. Carter Page: An energy consultant with experience working in Moscow, Carter Page was named a national security adviser to Donald Trump’s campaign in March 2016 ...”

“... sparkling songs. (Example: the deeply unsettling, off-kilter ‘Big Stripey Lie’ from her LP The Red Shoes.) Even as recently as 2005, on the more subdued Aerial, such traces remain: the huskily whispered love for mystical geometry in ‘π’,3 the oddly downbeat dream of aetherial flight that is ‘How to Be Invisible’.4Rushton was very coy about ...”

“... instead issuing proposals to rename Greenland ‘Red, White and Blueland’ (thanks, Rep. Buddy Carter). Such is Trump’s grip on the electorate in Republican primaries that no politician in a red state or district has any incentive to respond to his lawlessness.Trump’s measures have spurred some resistance from federal courts: some impoundments have ...”

“... taking account of the literary attitudes expressed in the London Introductory and Leslie Stephen Lectures. The author of such a study would find it helpful to have some understanding of the scholarly work which was the main business of Housman’s life, since the relation of this activity to his poetry is of great interest. Mr Graves quotes copiously ...”

“... as the heartland of hiphop, belt buckles were used for bragging and branding. Everyone wore them, Stephen Witt writes in How Music Got Free, at the CD pressing plant in North Carolina that handled heavyweight hiphop labels such as Def Jam, Interscope and Death Row. ‘The white guys wore big oval medallions with the stars and bars painted on. The black guys ...”

“... a cool French girl enamoured with Georges Bataille recalls Colette as someone whom Nana read sous le bonnet – under the hairdryer. Or when an old actor who once emoted Phèdre natters on about her cats.’‘What is the heart, madame?’ Colette once reported that a woman had asked her – a woman she had just heard pretending to sob, ‘like the notes of ...”

“... he did rise to a second-tier position in the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter. His intellectual achievements, by way of compensation, have far out-stripped those of his peers. His immensely influential Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), in particular, established his reputation as a leading authority on ...”

“... while Uncle Morgan, ducking his head and grinning whispered to left and right, ‘She’ll do it,’ gleefully, ‘Granny will do it!’  ‘Renée!’ shrieked her mother and fell on the baby, pulling the poor thing from the fire.  ‘She touched the fire, she touched the fire,’ the children shouted, jubilating, dismayed.  ‘Granny did not ...”

“... Poems such as ‘The Bas Bleu’ eulogised the bluestockings Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Carter who had made her welcome (the wealthy Montagu was one of her patrons); and when she started lecturing ‘the great’ on their propensity for drinking, gambling and having their hair done on Sundays (thus preventing their hairdressers from going to ...”

“... jurists bring to their cases. Sands portrays the Australian Percy Spender and the American Stephen Schwebel, two judges who served as president of the ICJ in the 1960s and 1990s respectively, as legally enrobed imperial apologists – though he doesn’t quite call them that. During a case brought by Liberia and Ethiopia against apartheid South Africa ...”