“... book could simply be titled America 1967; slickness, shallowness, and the flight from pain and death and art – all in one package’), and to decide if Making It was the victim of a vicious gang-up because it exposed the prissy hypocrisies of highbrows, its reception a mob rub-out. It also has something going for it now that it didn’t have ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he has to give the following week. He went to bed the night before after being told of the death of a British soldier in Afghanistan; now over breakfast, he is informed of the deaths of three more servicemen there in a suicide bombing. ‘I felt nauseous,’ he writes. ‘I thought of the families across Britain … who were about to receive a ...”

“... after elections to ensure that no votes or voting systems had been hacked or compromised.*The death toll from Hurricane Florence: 43 humans, 5500 pigs, 3,400,000 chickens.*A professor of psychology, Christine Blasey Ford, accuses Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a party when they were teenagers, turning up the music so ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”