“... and sentenced in Florida; while committing his crimes Bundy also wrote a rape crisis manual for Washington state.) For the character of Lecter, however, Harris manages an even better thing than doing his homework: he simply ignores it. Lecter is straightforwardly a monster, bearing no relation to any murderer who ever lived, but achieving an archetypal ...”

“... and women with equal ease. He was upset when a special comrade of long standing, Peter Doyle, a Washington streetcar conductor, drifted apart from him in the Seventies, when he was growing an old man; but Doyle was nearly thirty years younger and had his own life to live, as Whitman was the first to recognise. To a young English widow, Mrs Gilchrist, who ...”

“... very fast. He is 31 years old, and has been in full-time business three years. He was born in Washington DC, the offspring of ‘liberal’ parents: his father, as Matt recalls, was ‘one of those guys who wore Nixon masks in parades’. His mother campaigned for Clinton during the Primaries, although now she listens to Rush Limbaugh. Drudge himself is ...”

“... 1990 and, on ‘Earth Day’ later that year, Smith announced to incredulous journalists at the Washington Press Club that GM would have a viable production model of the electric car ready to roll in three years. CARB took Smith at his word, and issued its 1990 ‘mandate’. The Board decreed that, by 1998, Detroit’s big three and Japan’s big four ...”

“... he died (now, after years in the conservation studio, back on display in the National Gallery, Washington). It is illustrated in colour in Goffen’s book; there is a detail, as well, showing how worn and damaged the painting is, but also how many exquisite passages remain. Hair is no longer conceived of as finely-fashioned wire, but as soft and flowing ...”

“... Center has gone, and that others might be coloured by the emergence of the anthrax threat and John Ashcroft’s rise to power. It must have been tempting to introduce a phoney topicality, but with ‘so much fresh outrageousness being manufactured daily’, Franzen allowed himself only ‘minimal tinkering’. For Foden, the difficulties were more ...”

“... rolling, its farmland is welcoming, its mountains aren’t steep enough to be awe inspiring. Even Washington Irving’s famous Headless Horseman is swaddled by the name of his home in Sleepy Hollow. Roughly an hour or two from New York City, depending on how deeply scenic you want your trip to be, the Hudson Valley feels like a reassuring antidote to the ...”

“... cultural ascendancy was beginning. These artists – George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, John Sloan and George Bellows – had all (Bellows apart) started out in the 1890s as newspaper sketch-artists in Philadelphia. Drawn together by the magnetic preaching of Robert Henri, a slightly older painter who had returned from art school in Paris to his ...”

“... the only reason he was feeling better, however. On holiday in Corsica with his Harvard friend John Edsall in spring 1926, he took to reading Proust, and fastened on a passage from A la recherche that released him from his feelings of self-contempt by acknowledging the pervasiveness of human moral frailty – especially the ‘indifference to the ...”

“... was: ‘Gentlemen, the Times is printed – by steam.’ The year was 1814; the proprietor was John Walter II; the new technology was the Koenig steam-driven press capable of over a thousand impressions an hour, against the 250 impressions which was all the old Stanhope iron press could manage; and his tactic of secrecy and confrontation (he was frightened ...”

“... racist and sexist prejudices, crowning them with a volley of insults against his former beloved John Major. Evans’s outburst coincided with one from Lord Tebbit, another former MP who made a fortune from privatisation – in his case by joining the board of British Telecom, which as Secretary of State for Industry he had privatised. Tebbit’s target was ...”

“... In​ the TV drama Bad Sisters, set in Dublin, four sisters conspire to murder their brother-in-law John Paul, an abusive monster who is married to their beloved sister, Grace. The dynamics of the marriage are clear from the pilot. It’s Christmas Day and tradition has it that the siblings meet at Forty Foot – a swimming spot just south of Dublin – for a dip ...”

“... It has become the party of wars and jails, and its moral physiognomy is captured by the faces of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, faces hard to match outside Cruikshank’s drawings of Dickens’s villains, hard as nails and mean as dirt and with an issue still up their sleeve when wars wind down and the jails are full: a sworn hostility towards immigrants ...”

“... Not one of the 28 ministers saw fit to consider the hypocrisy of their position. Their ally in Washington had been bombing targets in Syria for more than a year without UN Security Council authorisation. France had started doing the same two months earlier. The Cameron government in Britain was impatient to follow suit. No one seemed to notice the double ...”

“... all who promoted evil in this country.’ We were at Mar-a-Lago for the premiere of a film about John Eastman, one of the lawyers who tried to overturn the 2020 election results. Buses were bringing in guests from the Hilton West Palm Beach; ‘red-carpet opportunities’ with Rudy Giuliani had been advertised. The film came out on the anniversary of the ...”