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“... of academic complacency. ‘Lightning, Phoenix, Arizona’ has the abrupt menace of a David Lynch dream sequence, the cardiac arrest when a previously straightforward narrative crosses the line and touches a vertiginous post-mortem truth. We need to be reminded of the ugly, petrol-breathed, epidermic floss sulking past our own windows. These ...”

“... the Trump campaign on an unpaid basis. He had no evident qualifications: a few years at Merrill Lynch, a stint in Moscow, an unpublishable PhD on oil and gas in the ex-Soviet Union. But he offered to broker connections between Trump and senior Russian officials. He also dangled the prospect of a direct meeting with Putin. This was dressed up as a means of ...”

“... billion announced with $8-11 billion more to come) and Stan O’Neal at Merrill Lynch (loss: $8 billion). But the really big worry concerns a further category of derivatives based on the sub-prime mortgages. Many banks are thought to have huge positions in these, hidden in what are known as ‘structured investment vehicles’. These don’t ...”

“... died, and eight more men – Patsy O’Hara, Raymond McCreesh, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine – starved themselves to death in the months that followed. During that summer of 1981, the Northern Ireland crisis came closer than ever before or since to ...”

“... feature for Vanity Fair. We learn that Bob Dylan adored her in Raintree County and that David Lynch kissed her after the 1987 Oscars (she was a fan of Blue Velvet) and that she resented Andy Warhol for making millions by turning her face into a silk screen image. What the book doesn’t do is discuss Taylor’s film performances in any depth. This starts ...”

“... An alternative authority suggests St Cyril of Alexandria, the notorious fanatic who stirred up a lynch mob against Hypatia, but in an apocryphal letter only. I was embarked on a paper chase in a strong breeze and so far, the trail has scattered. It reveals something about the autonomy of stories as artefacts and the delta of literature they course through ...”

“... else would Roy Jenkins choose to write about Asquith, Conor Cruise O’Brien about Edmund Burke, Michael Foot about Aneurin Bevan, E.P. Thompson about William Morris and (ridiculously) Boris Johnson about Winston Churchill? The problem is rather that identification has led Holmes to echo, rather than analyse and explain, Pankhurst’s own version of her ...”

“... were once plentiful in Dublin. I became interested in a gloss on page 1230 which states that ‘Michael Begnal suggests, perhaps not entirely seriously, that she [Martha Clifford, from whom Bloom receives a letter] is actually Ignatius Gallaher.’ This thesis, we learn from the copious bibliography, was first aired by Begnal in the James Joyce Quarterly in ...”

“... American network television for two months. During those two months, ABC news had 121 stories on Michael Jackson and 42 stories on Natalee Holloway, a high-school student who disappeared from a bar while on holiday in Aruba. CBS news had 235 stories about Michael Jackson and 70 about Natalee Holloway. I heard that in the ...”

“... and travel. His father was Charles ‘Good-time Charlie’ Merrill, cofounder of Merrill Lynch, who earned his moniker through prodigious accumulation of money and women. James Merrill was at the forefront of American poetry in the 1970s but is seldom read today. Despite this, he is a significant poet, preternaturally gifted, a master of form (metre ...”

“... such as the thumbscrew, the fustuarium, breaking on the wheel, garrotting, the rack, racial lynch mobs, autos-da-fé, or the early modern English spectator sport of hanging, drawing and quartering. Meanwhile, away from the public gaze, 20th-century Europeans came up with planned famine, human vivisection and the use of Zyklon B as a human ...”

“... And now, here’s The Pale King, this book-shaped version of the ‘long thing’, assembled by Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s editor on Infinite Jest, from ‘a neat stack of manuscript, 12 chapters totalling nearly 250 pages’ discovered by Wallace’s agent on the desk in his home office, augmented by a selection from ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of less ...”

“... the employees of the vast ‘realism v. anti-realism’ industry founded by his Oxford colleague Michael Dummett) when, following Locke, he insists that physical science is less bound up with human interests and needs than are, say, chess, novel-writing or the munitions industry. The question of whether any area of human culture could be less bound up with ...”

“... models; even the biggest developers and the most enormous projects now try, in the words of Michael Bloomberg’s administration, to ‘build like Moses with Jane Jacobs in mind’. Zipp and Storring write that we live in a ‘triumphant era of urban symphony’, where the things that once marked Jacobs out as subversive and eccentric – a love of ...”

“... mapped networks and amassed evidence. In 2021 he brought down the billionaire New York collector Michael Steinhardt, a hedge fund manager also accused of sexual harassment by several women, who admitted that buying risky objects was ‘like an addiction’. Bogdanos raided his Fifth Avenue apartment and seized 180 stolen objects valued at $70 ...”