“... of ‘narcoterrorism’ from prison in the US. North’s partner in the Iran-Contra affair, Richard Secord, was an air force special operator who had dispatched regular flights to Laos for General Vang and advised the Imperial Iranian Air Force (establishing the contacts that were later utilised in arms sales to Iran). Secord was also involved in ...”

“... as a ‘Toxic Super-Ego’, a concept he has learned from the charismatic YouTube psychologist Richard Grannon. But Charles reckons there’s something about Grannon himself that ‘doesn’t entirely add up’. If he’s really a lost soul like Charles, how can he also be ‘a life-coach/therapist and teach high-level martial arts and do a series of other ...”

“... Forrest, convicted of two brutal murders and suspected of at least five others, grew up a few miles east of the Alcoa smelter in Vancouver, Washington. Randall Woodfield, the I-5 Killer, lived as a child in Salem, Oregon, close to an industrial site that pumped out lead, sulphur dioxide, arsenic, barium and cyanide. The ill effects of ingested lead and ...”

“... caricatured by some on the British left, who sometimes treat it as if it were six hundred square miles of South Kensington. He is in no doubt that London’s agglomeration of wealth, power and status is damaging to the rest of the country, but makes clear that this is just as damaging to Londoners. The ‘concentration of all English politics in London has ...”

“... move, part of a Saudi-UAE effort to counter what they present as Iranian influence. As Richard Sokolsky and Aaron David Miller put it in an article for Politico, The crown prince engineered this dispute not to punish Qatar for its financing of terrorism (a hypocritical comment coming from the Saudis, whose own citizens have provided funding to ...”

“... the kingdome of our own language,’ and if English writers from the 1580s onwards can be seen, as Richard Helgerson argued in Forms of Nationhood (1992), to be engaged in a struggle to reinvent a barbarous provincial tongue as an instrument of cultural authority, then Shakespeare’s dramaturgy was of a piece with such designs: for him the Greek and Roman ...”

“... to have felt that voting might be a special case that needed further consideration. However, as Richard Tuck points out in his fascinating new book about the strange hold that the free rider problem has had on political science ever since Olson, such misgivings have not stopped many of his followers from treating voting as the paradigmatic case of the ...”

“... and the London Waste Ltd plant in particular, was investigated by the television journalist Richard Watson for Newsnight. A predictable story of fudging, economy with the truth, buck-passing and ministerial denial. Until August 2000, London Waste was guilty of mixing relatively safe bottom ash with the contaminated fly ash that the process was ...”

“... have tended to feel either hagiographic or hostile. The famous early masterpiece of debunking was Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version, published in 1968 and a product of that anti-establishment end-of-decade. Loveable Uncle Walt had been dead for less than two years. Schickel’s work is still superbly readable and shrewd even when it is deeply unfair; it ...”

“... suddenly he would break into a big smile. He was gracious, but he said what he thought.’ Like Richard Yates, a near contemporary and friend who was also famous on the writing-school circuit for not being famous, Williams served in the war and had a few unsuccessful marriages, drank too much, promoted a writerly ideal of Flaubert-like strenuousness, and ...”

“... out in a group of ambitious black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked ...”

“... evening, if they tried. The difference was that their killing was a secret. People living a few miles away could see tall towers which every few hours gushed flame-red and black. But they were not meant to know why. Once there was a time when the most evil people on earth were ashamed to write their crime across the heavens. Now, too late, leaders are ...”

“... got a couple of quarts of blackberries in his arms, picked with the morning dew, five hundred miles away.’ Edward Dorn.) Even Ben Watson, whose poodle parlour is wall to wall with off-piste names, admits (in conversation) that he has never been introduced to Woolf’s work: ‘My book’s sub-plot is Philip K. Dick, sales-talk, Hollywood and ...”

“... confounded his public when, after a steady diet of Bach and Beethoven, he turned to composers like Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Grieg and Bizet, praising them to the skies and certainly above the pianistic romantics whom everyone else played. Even with Bach and Mozart, he chose tempi that defied convention and, since he played the same work differently on ...”

“... and in this its title supports me, for, though West is discussing Robert Elsmere, The Case of Richard Meynell and Daphne, the ethos that Mrs Humphry Ward puts forward is the only thing that really interests her. Even when she comments that on every relevant page the face of the heroine Catherine Leyburn ‘works with emotion and is illuminated by a ...”