“... sent her four-page letter to the Post. Instead, a year later she sent a copy of the letter to Max Holland, a long-time student of the Warren Commission, who recently sent me a copy. Roman also wrote to Jeremy Gunn, the executive director of the JFK Assassination Records Review Board, telling him she had agreed to the interview with Morley ‘against my ...”

“... by the reaction to his earlier book into seeing a wider world of writing. There are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert Hayden, Jay Wright) as well as on 12 women writers. Toni Morrison (‘a child of Faulkner’) is given shorter shrift than she deserves and told off for being ideological, but ...”

“... then you will understand the trrragedy’ – to a student who claimed not to see the point of Max.‘Andrew, with your Kant worrrrk’, ‘Sara, your labours with Krrristeva’, ‘Tony, with your worrrk on Fichte’: four or five of us took every class Rose would give us, and obviously, I called us the Rosettes. Ridiculous, I used to think, addressing ...”

“... and Gossaert has painted his own name below it (and again on the neck ornament of Balthazar’s black servant). On the right, Melchior is waiting with his presentation, rather precariously balanced in his limp hand. The detail is such that one can distinguish the hairs on the mole on Caspar’s cheek. Above the scene, and in another order of things, the ...”

“... for insanity and the ‘insane act’. As for the extremely influential degenerationist writing of Max Nordau, it surely must be seen in its own terms – as an example of paranoia as a wish, even a dream, come true. In Degeneration, dedicated to the criminologist and psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, Nordau sees the 20th century as a death rattle, not for ...”

“... However empty his promises proved to be, Americans can congratulate themselves on having elected a black man; now, in the feel-good world of identity politics, it’s time to elect a woman. Who else but Hillary Clinton? Clinton’s Hard Choices is the quintessential candidate’s memoir, a 600-page doorstopper detailing her four years as secretary of state ...”

“... soon flags and nobody seems to mind if I say the same thing three times over with three minutes max per interview. It’s all very jolly, some of them shake hands and there are occasional selfies, but even when we’ve been at it an hour we haven’t reached the end of the line. Then we are called inside to be shepherded with Maggie Smith through the foyer ...”

“... If you can swallow your embarrassment, there is much to enjoy in the way he turns up every dial to max and then turns it up a little bit more, assisted by Chris O’Donnell as a surprisingly effective straight guy. To me, Heat is a stranger case. Pacino puts in a bizarrely strident and overblown performance as the cop to Robert de Niro’s robber. De Niro is ...”

“... way. We didn’t know the song had originally been written and performed by the light entertainer Max Bygraves, but intuited that McLaren’s version was an assault on the middle-aged and middle of the road. Elsewhere on the record, Sid Vicious too defiled showbiz with his punk take on ‘My Way’, twisting Sinatra’s swagger into psychopathic ...”

“... context, but also fuelled more serious crime. ‘That means violence, bribery, depravity, black market, dirty money.’The Louvre’s director at the time, Jean-Luc Martinez, seems to have done nothing with these findings. According to a report by the Office Central de Lutte contre le Trafic des Biens Culturels, quoted in Libération, Martinez was ...”

“... in his childhood, two stand out: the first is of the young Lynch registering with horror the black, ant-infested sap oozing out of a cherry tree, a sign of the ‘wild pain and decay that accompanies everything’; the second is of Lynch and his brother playing on the street one evening, when a naked woman with a bloodied mouth stumbled ‘out of the ...”

“... Bridget has given us a cow creamer she has made. Unglazed, it is chunky and solid and striped black and white like a bovine zebra. It’s a delightful object, a convict cow, and could she be bothered to make more and market them I’m sure they would sell for a substantial price. As it is, it stands on the kitchen table waiting to find its – or her ...”

“... known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into colour. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.’ He did not feel that, maybe, but he could make a man who did. ‘I don’t remember what I did with all my real attention, what-all it was going towards,’ Fogle ...”

“... Despite this, a militant cast of mind has flourished in media and government circles. In Max Weber’s typology, the sect has become a church – at home with wealth and power and governed by Church Fathers who learned geopolitical casuistry as directors of US intelligence agencies, the neoconservatives’ institutional home.In retrospect, this coup ...”

“... his ankle, just visible under the hem of his trousers, and saw it had been replaced by a slender black rod. We were both heading for the same rehabilitation centre. I guessed it was Nabokov. In January he’d been coming to the end of his first year of service in the army’s 58th Brigade when he stepped on a mine. He was with a group assigned to pick up ...”