“... idea that Obama’s story is destined to be one of healing. The first comes when McCain nominates Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin was an electrifying campaigner but a hopeless candidate. She turned out to be ignorant, irritable and prone to blanking in the face of even mildly hostile questioning. But she sure knew how to rouse the Republican base. Both ...”

“... Shipman Andrews has much of the triumphant cheek of Bobby Ewing’s shrugging-off of his own death and 30 episodes of Dallas as only Pam’s dream-work: ‘None of that happened.’ It bears also the implication that the Denbigh option would – or should – only be imaginable to an excitable adolescent (Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews was 47). Having sunk ...”

“... sounds. Last month, following Wayne Couzens’s conviction for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard, a police commissioner, Philip Allott, resigned after giving a radio interview suggesting that Everard should not have ‘submitted’ to arrest by her killer, who was, at the time, a serving police officer.Newton also cross-examined Harvey about ...”

“... anyone being told there were suspicions against him) from treating the US team in 2015 after Sarah Jantzi, who coached Maggie Nichols, overheard Nichols and her teammates Alyssa Baumann and Aly Raisman talking about him. ‘Does he stick his fingers up there? Do you jump when he does that?’ Baumann asked the others. Jantzi told Rhonda Faehn, head of ...”

“... her only options were to accept insecurity or enter a convent. Teresa chose the latter. After the death of her mother, when Teresa was eleven, she found a surrogate in the Virgin Mary and spirituality in tales of sainthood and sacrifice. Aged twenty she took holy orders at the local Carmelite convent. In the following years she fell strangely ill, and during ...”

“... The novelist’s rage was only in-creased by his supposed inability to mourn his father’s death, and this gets transfigured into the monomanaical vengefulness, the compulsive penis envy, and the desire to be whipped, of Captain Ahab. Only Richard Henry Dana in Two Years Before the Mast and, in The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman, whose homosexual ...”

“... called him, had administered, manipulating the doses between addiction, withdrawal and certain death in a sinister pas de deux with Morrell’s writing and rewriting of codicils to her will. ‘Poor soul, she was in terrible agony,’ the Doctor said.Ostensibly, Bedford’s book is about what the writer calls ‘the law’s patient production ...”

“... make sense of its own subjectivity.In Homo Sacer (1995), Giorgio Agamben argued that in the Nazi death camps the state of exception became the norm. People were reduced to the condition of ‘bare life’: destitution, hunger, the ever-present threat of death. Extending this idea, Mbembe argues that Foucault’s concept of ...”

“... her film, only more so, Monroe was tireless in her indictment of the part played by ignorance in a death-dealing world. It is something of a truism for psychoanalysis that one member of a family can carry the unconscious secrets of a whole family, can fall sick, as it were, on their behalf. My question is: for whom or what in 1950s and early 1960s America ...”

“... honour that could have come my way.15 February. Good reviews for Richard Wilson’s production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Sheffield. In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or anally raped or has his or her ...”

“... against all known laws of physics, and we have a moment where we hear all his thoughts as Death clogs his failing body through space and time. There. Done. The Pale King never needed to happen, nor all the rest of it. Though there is one thing we wouldn’t want to lose: a character named Mr Bussy. That’s how I felt before I read ...”

“... after my father had died. He had made tyrannical demands of her in his last years, so that his death came to her as a liberation. She could watch television without constantly being interrupted by shouts from his bedroom to make him a cup of tea; she was free to immerse herself in reading the great Russian novels and writing a book of her own, a series of ...”

“... Obama’s chief spokesman on the politics of the region, had met with Stevens shortly before his death to discuss how America could help rebuild Libya’s higher education system (it’s hard to think of anything that would be more of a red rag to the bull of the alt-right than that idea). He soon got caught up in the madness that followed. It became the ...”

“... on his friends (including Wordsworth), on the Wedgwoods, and on his pupils, and was courting Sarah Wedgwood and the £25,000 which went with her. Hazlitt once again (and this time he could have had Wordsworth’s loan to Montagu in mind): ‘A member of the ideal and perfect commonwealth of letters lends another a hundred pounds for immediate and ...”

“... his work, notably the Ford Lectures on The Nobility of Later Medieval England published after his death. However, through his teaching and lecturing and the supervision of a large number of graduate students who then went on to greater things, he was undoubtedly the leading medieval historian of his time. A perfectionist in both his research and writing he ...”