“... over so much of our lives to this crap: we turn on Baywatch, we buy tickets to Eraser, we christen Michael Jackson the King of Pop and indulge him in his public psychosis (except for Jarvis Cocker, bless his heart). If our actions were involuntary – if, say, Home Improvement was forced on us in the same way that the ...”

“... of American resolve is in prospect, the figure of Hitler is as difficult to exclude as the head of King Charles. The drawback in the analogy is that, from a Hitler, it is impossible to demand much less than his complete destruction or unconditional surrender. Still, other keywords such as ‘expansion’ and ‘poison gas’ do keep on creeping in. Partly as a ...”

“... it was a left hook which put him away after 93 seconds (two seconds more than it took to deal with Michael Spinks last year). The Guardian reporter said the critical punch sounded ‘like an axe going into wet wood’. On TV it looked less impressive. Besides, Mailer used that image to describe the death of Benny Paret in Madison Square Garden 27 years ago at ...”

“... significantly from the temporary release of the Balcombe Street IRA gang and the Loyalist killer Michael Stone. I remember die Kipling story, ‘The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat’. I fear the flat-earthers and can’t be sure. Outside the headquarters of the Ulster Democratic Party (associated with the UDA) – a narrow converted shop on the ...”

“... as a false friend to the Jews.After the war ended, Irgun violence increased. In 1946, the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was blown up, killing 91 people, while the Irgun and Sternists raided military bases and attacked trains, in a campaign modelled on the IRA’s in 1919-21 (Yitzhak Shamir, the Sternist leader who ordered Moyne’s assassination, used ...”

“... xeroxed scriptures at the urging of his host, the late Chief Jack Naiva. In the one he picked, the King, tall and strong, a hero from Wolwatu (World War Two), was sailing around the southwestern coast of Tanna, and gazed sadly out to shore. When his wife, Kwin Lisbet, asked him what was wrong, he pointed to a rock in the distance known as Nuaru, a name meaning ...”

“... in this. The United States didn’t win a war for independence against a tyrannical British king just so that two centuries later it could commune with the spirits of Cecil Rhodes and John Buchan in neo-imperialist seances alongside the set of countries bearing the queen’s head on their coins. But this hasn’t stopped certain Anglosphericals ...”

“... on the other, revived a canonical story. Narrated by one of the wicked sisters, the book retold King Lear as a domestic tragicomedy. It remains her best work. Horse Heaven, like its immediate predecessors, treads a fine line between straightforwardly adopting and debunking the forms it appropriates. There is no plot as such, but by accommodating its ...”

“... to suggest that Macbeth, crazed and ambitious as he is, even as he contemplates the killing of his king, can still represent a more ordinary human disarray among matters that are too large, too consequential for us. Alert too to see that Shakespeare represents this case not only dramatically but also through his character’s choice of an individual word. But ...”

“... an account of de Clérambault’s most famous instance, a French woman who was convinced that King George V was in love with her and believed, among other things, that a slight twitch of the curtains at Buckingham Palace was a signal to her. Enduring Love has a case-study of Jed in an appendix, complete with professional jargon and not entirely fake ...”

“... two further, later novels, not in the sequence, called O How the Wheel Becomes It and The Fisher King. The Powell offered to us here, in the pre-title list of his books, is the author of a nine-volume sequence of novels called A Dance to the Music of Time, and a further four-volume sequence called Books to Furnish a Room.The attraction of the slip is ...”

“... Briefly during the second act Michael Frayn’s stage-play, Make and Break, transcends its setting, a Frankfurt trade fair, touching on a general gloom. Mrs Rogers is treating Garrard, a goatish sales rep, to the fruits of Buddhism. It is late in the day. Elsewhere assignations are arranged, faces stuffed, drinks swilled ...”

“... Such crude correlations are, of course, easily misleading. But a recent econometric study by Michael Sarel (admittedly published in that notorious hotbed of irresponsible radicalism, the IMF Staff Papers) argues on the basis of cross-country evidence that inflation appears to have quite different effects when it is low and when it is high. Sarel ...”

“... little ease’ for his disobedience to its commands. Witherley applied to the court of King’s Bench in London for a writ of habeas corpus so that they might investigate the reason for his detention. The court issued the writ, but nothing happened. So it sent a second writ addressed to the jailer, Hunnyngs, along with an attachment for contempt ...”

“... Jackanapes in Prating Alley (1693), articulates satire through imaginary titles such as Near is my King, but nearer is my Skin (‘to be sold at the Sign of the Jack-Pudding’); A Dissertation of the No Power of a No Parliament, making a No King, that will always be doing us No Good; and A New-invented Mathematical ...”