“... mutilated’. He felt ‘weary and exasperated’, like a man ‘compelled to walk across a field of glue’. The more surprising thing – heartening evidence, perhaps, of Britain’s relatively open wartime society – was that the Sunday Express chose to publish his complaints. Stourton writes that a diary kept by Marjorie Redman, a BBC employee, is ...”

“... Berenson became an intimate friend, and their correspondence over the years – witty and very frank – is one of Sisman’s richest sources. But, unexpectedly, Sisman himself comes downstage to pitch an authorial mud pie: ‘It was possible to see Berenson as an old fraud, a man who had squandered his talents in the pursuit of money, and whose ...”

“... Ruth Sullivan, the doyenne of American parent advocates, said that the movie had ‘advanced the field of autism by 25 years’. The new public fascination with autism, coupled with the rise in diagnoses, gave activist groups a long-awaited chance to secure funding for their cause and help from social services. Their goals were admirable, but they went after ...”

“... strangled to death. When Fanon’s newspaper, months later, pictured Abane as ‘dead on the field of honour’ – when it declared that he had been wounded in a firefight with the French, and had fought for his life at the start of 1958 – it was a necessary lie.‘Necessary’ is a Fanon word; Shatz is alert to this too. Fanon’s world has a ...”

“... is also the best means of establishing a controversy.’ Or, as the Republican pollster Frank Luntz put it in a memo to party activists during W.’s first midterms, ‘Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack ...”

“... acknowledged a legal right to privacy. The German basic law, like the US constitution, contains no frank privacy right, but where American courts have let their common law privacy rights wilt in the shadow of the First Amendment, German courts have extracted from the constitutional protection of individual integrity a qualified right (somewhat overqualified in ...”

“... side of the Puget Sound urban corridor. Poujade – and Jean-Marie Le Pen – would have had a field day here; as, I’m afraid, will the McCain-Palin ticket in November. Until now, the political leaders who’ve used the movement to their electoral advantage have come to it as outsiders. Reagan the Hollywood actor, Perot the data-processing ...”

“... and local prison systems are separate. After Vietnam, they no longer trust the natives.) In 1963 Frank Walton, the director of USAID’s Public Safety Program, signed an order at one Vietnamese prison that detainees be ‘isolated from all others for months at a time’ and be subject to ‘immobilisation – the prisoner is bolted to the floor, handcuffed ...”

“... was his middle name. The Lea/Lee puzzle is easily solved. The river is the Lea. It rises in a field near Luton, loses its identity to the Lee Navigation, a canal, then reclaims it for the spill into the Thames at Bow Creek. The earlier spelling, in the River Improvement Acts of 1424 and 1430, was ‘Ley’, which is even better. Lea as ley, it always had ...”

“... and has been followed by Mark Thornton Burnett’s edition of the plays for Everyman in 1999, and Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey’s for Penguin in 2003; the first Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe appeared last month (edited by Patrick Cheney).* Even without the bloodshed and intrigue that the fatal stab wound in Deptford supplies, the ...”

“... or Apollinaire did. (Never mind other teen crushes like Charlie Parker and William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara and Andy Warhol.) He felt like a poet with a capital P, writhing in the coils of Church and Satan, Evil and Beauty, Sin and Damnation. Which, God knows, all held plenty of allure for a sulky, half-Catholic male adolescent. But Baudelaire the poet ...”

“... justice’. He had recently stepped down as director of public prosecutions when his local MP, Frank Dobson, announced his retirement. Starmer entered the race to replace him as the member for Holborn and St Pancras. He was a political unknown in a crowded field, facing past and present leaders of Camden Council as well ...”

“... they can clean up Western civilisation by treating the canon as if it were a water pistol. As Frank Kermode argues in a brilliant chapter on the subject in History and Value, canons are indeed ‘complicit with power’. However, since the institution of literature could conceivably exist without a canon, those who attack only the latter – the central ...”

“... one summer, to exchange thoughts which, in each case, would probably have been too intimate or too frank, or simply too intelligent, to have been confided to anyone else in their separate circles of acquaintance. ‘As I can see from the space left on the paper that we still have a good way to go before we reach Nörreport,’ writes ...”

“... ironic, single-breath, present tense, synthesised diary-takes by one of the great Americans; Frank O’Hara on his lunch hour from the Museum of Modern Art; Douglas Woolf driving somewhere, between jobs; Fielding Dawson. Drummond speaks of the pieces that make up 45 as ‘stories’. Some of them are very short, a set of acknowledgments dropped into the ...”