“... The Seven Per Cent Solution. Many American and British novelists, from Truman Capote to Piers Paul Read, have taken on the non-fiction thriller. But the benefits of fictional devices to serious non-fiction, from the days of André Maurois’s romanticised version of Shelley to Norman Mailer’s pastiche of Marilyn Monroe, have seemed more dubious. With ...”

“... white. If Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a minute.In 2020 the New Yorker ran a piece by Paul Elie, the author of a biographical study of four Catholic writers including O’Connor, in which he suggested that her admirers had been ‘downplaying’ her comments about Baldwin ever since they were first published in 1974. This wasn’t entirely ...”

“... Jarman made a note in his diary in April 1989: ‘Since autumn: Terry, Robert, David, Ken, Paul, Howard. All the brightest and best trampled to death – surely even the Great War brought no more loss into one life in just 12 months, and all this as we made love not war.’ In March 1992: ‘We talked of the people who died of Aids this week.’ ‘To ...”

“... and operating ‘free from statutory constraints’. Northamptonshire’s chief executive, Paul Blantern, has said that what’s left of the council, rebranded as County Council Group, will operate ‘almost like a PLC’. This is the context for Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse agenda, which promised new powers to (traditionally Labour) cities and ...”

“... magazine the Noble Savage, and Ellison issued a series of optimistic forecasts. In 1955 he told Paul Engle, the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, that ‘I hope to finish by 1956.’ In November 1961 he wrote of ‘a long novel I hope to publish next year’. But he was still tinkering with the manuscript at the time of his death more than 32 years ...”

“... and Other Poems. Prynne’s first book was put out by stolid publishers, Routledge and Kegan Paul, in 1962. An uneasy beginning, as he glossed in a letter to Charles Olson: the book was, he said, ‘96 per cent of no interest to me’. There would be no reprise in any of the collected editions. The influence of Prynne’s early mentor Donald Davie can ...”

“... They gave it to you for what reason?’*The president comments on the election of Boris Johnson: ‘Good man. He’s tough and he’s smart. They’re saying “Britain Trump”. They call him “Britain Trump”, and there’s people saying that’s a good thing. They like me over there.’*The president tweets: ‘Chairman Kim has a great and ...”

“... of his significance. A notable example appeared in this paper (8 February 1990), when R.W. Johnson sharply criticised Williams’s political judgment and wrote in disparaging terms about the combination of uplift and unrealism allegedly characteristic of the Welsh labour movement from which he was assumed to have emerged. This contested ...”

“... War – indeed, it was the worldview that consigned Barry Goldwater to crushing defeat by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But eventually it moved inside the charmed circle, becoming regarded as responsible opinion and engulfing the Democratic Party even more thoroughly than the Republicans.During the weeks, months and years after the towers fell, as fear and anger ...”

“... and more or less equal numbers of fashion shots and celebrity portraits (do we really need Boris Johnson?). But the catalogue, the real star of the show, gives a thorough account of the magazine’s history. Condé Nast, who had bought the US version in 1909, wasn’t taking any risks by launching a British edition: American Vogue was the second most popular ...”

“... that are undimmed in this final volume. There are other works on the same theme, for example, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976) and Ben Wilson’s lively Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy (2013), but these shorter works concentrate on high power politics rather than the inner workings of the Royal ...”

“... catalogues of rare-book dealers. Her bust of Mussolini gathers dust in the basement of the Herbert Johnson Museum at Cornell University.) The whole affair is not without comic touches – Pound offers ‘my support’ to Mussolini, as though it might be of momentous significance to him – and an element of absurdity: consider a number of the Transatlantic ...”

“... of forces such as institutionalised racism (he collaborated with the Black sociologist Charles S. Johnson), while his democratic instincts in general introduced a note of human warmth into the chilly atmosphere of the American psychoanalytic establishment.Sullivan died in 1949, by which time Pearce had a thriving practice of her own. She had also succumbed to ...”

“... in men in question???’ I wrote shriekingly in the margin. A few months​ later she married Paul Suttman, a sculptor so devoted to aesthetics that he told Lucia she was asymmetrical the first time she undressed for him. (She was diagnosed with scoliosis at the age of ten.) He chose forks with only two tines, ‘so it was difficult to eat ...”

“... in exciting times. And Oppenheimer was beginning to feel as if he might be one of them. When Paul Dirac arrived at Cambridge, Oppenheimer found himself admiring but not worshipping or envying him. Fertile ideas were popping up all over the place in this seedtime of quantum physics. In Paris, in 1923, Louis DeBroglie had put forward the outlandish notion ...”