“... his biographers in dismissing them in a page or two as ‘somewhat crackbrained’, to quote Richard Shannon. Shannon’s two-volume life offers a fuller account of Gladstone’s intellectual development than other modern biographies, yet even he allots as much space to Macaulay’s mesmerisingly destructive review of The State in Its Relations with the ...”

“... and brothers’. Most were written by established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff selected, engage with the ...”

“... why Israel had to call up its reserve forces when Egypt mobilised its army in the Sinai peninsula, miles from the border? Segev notes that Israel had seen no need to respond to similar manoeuvres a few months earlier. Was Nasser’s rhetoric the new element that precipitated war? Perhaps. Were Israel’s warnings to Syria, especially Rabin’s warning, some ...”

“... psalmodic line (and of much archaic poetry) has been plain in English since the translations of Miles Coverdale in 1535. Coverdale marked the division into hemistiches (or what Alter, following Benjamin Hrushovski, calls ‘versets’) with a colon, a practice followed, inconsistently, by the King James. Bishop Robert Lowth explained it in detail in 1753 in ...”

“... In April​ 2022, Justin Trudeau watched Richard Baker, the 39th governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, hand over ownership of its ornate department store in Winnipeg to the local First Nations. The ceremonial was Hanoverian, with Baker and Grand Chief Jerry Daniels trading pelts and a gold coin, but the rhetoric was that of postcolonial reconciliation ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”