“... contemporary biographer’ as engaged in a life-and-death struggle – ‘forced, by the mere dead weight of paper, by the mountains of letters and journals and newspapers, to melt his materials or be smothered by them’. By the time the second volume was published in 1962, the reader, too, was potentially imperilled: ‘My task,’ Edel wrote, ‘has been ...”

“... swans. Women give birth on the stairs. A particular form of lovemaking, the man pressing his weight to the woman’s unresponsive back, recalls the executed youth hauled from the pit. (A long-haired sacrificial male god straight out of The Ballad of Reading Gaol.) Each element is made to vibrate against its contrary. Binding’s narratives, carefully ...”

“... campy romps such as Myra Breckinridge and Duluth, political dramas (The Best Man, An Evening with Richard Nixon), and TV travelogues (Vidal in Venice). With the exception of John Updike, no American novelist of the postwar period has shown as much disinterested devotion to criticism as a regular practice (as opposed to an easy way to keep your name in print ...”

“... Freed earlier and more substantially than the British intellectual and student left from the dead weight of Communist orthodoxy, the American equivalent was able to enter into an alliance with disenfranchised Southern blacks which effectively desegregated the South in the decade following Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on an Alabama bus in ...”

“... affliction or another.’ Many of his early maladies went undiagnosed. He was unable to gain weight. (Later, he was treated for this with injections of testosterone, which, Dallek speculates, might have enhanced his already healthy libido.) As a teenager he was so skinny that his classmates called him ‘Rat Face’. His older brother, Joe, was not only ...”

“... so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far?’ Richard Hofstadter asked. Graffiti artists shared the intelligentsia’s disdain and defaced Goldwater’s campaign billboards, appending the word ‘Wing’ to his slogan ‘In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.’ Others added the coda: ‘In Your Guts You Know ...”

“... endles space of eternite’. Life was lived somewhere in-between. The Northamptonshire landowner Richard Hotot gives a sense of time’s fractured geometry, dating a book to ‘the 33rd year of King Henry [III] son of King John, which is 5448 years from the beginning of the world, 1249 from the birth of Christ, 1216 from Christ’s death, 544 from the ...”

“... and in some instances the attribution is still being debated. The resemblances add further weight to Fraser’s argument that her subjects comprise a distinct criminological phenomenon, and she widens her geographic scope accordingly, turning to killers from lead-rich zones well outside the Pacific Northwest. The Chicagoan John Wayne Gacy, who killed ...”

“... on the crust and the viscous mantle below like a body on a yielding, elastic surface, but that weight also made the land around the ice sheet bulge up. When the climate changed and the ice left its bed, the weighed-down land began to spring back, and the bulging land, including what is now Lincolnshire and London, started to relax. This alone is making ...”

“... a particular conflict, acquired a more literal force. The two conceptions were not of comparable weight: the latter lacking any practical purchase, the field of international politics was left to the former. But far from ending wars, balance of power politics generated a series of them, culminating in the global struggle of the Seven Years’ War.To the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... anachronistic, antiqued model of “good literature”’; he quoted the naturalist Richard Mabey, who, like Fisher, had known and loved that coast for years. To read Sebald, according to Mabey, was to watch the belittlement of ‘a very close friend’.Fisher’s first book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? was published towards the ...”

“... or the magical or any such claptrap. I despise myths and legends and their ilk. I believe that Richard Dawkins does not go nearly far enough when he says that astrologers should be prosecuted for fraud. Instead, priests and imams and monks and rabbis from every religion should be thrown into prison, unless and until they can prove the truth of their ...”

“... put out by the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority dazzle with their high gloss. They confuse weight with importance. Lee Valley Regional Park Plan, Part One: Strategic Policy Framework runs to 180 pages – with charts, illustrations, maps. Statements of intent. Best Value. Whatever turns you on, the Lea Valley has got it. A media-friendly zone (close to ...”