“... with the wives answering the phones. Then: world domination. Welcome to the inside track on what Scott Fitzgerald called ‘the orgastic future’. In Britain, soap operas tend to be about poor people, and the drama of American capitalism can seem both obnoxious and ridiculous, yet the rise of CAA is a wonderful story of greed and genius. What is a good ...”

“... being central to any of the novels’ plots as they unfold.Val McDermid has called Herron ‘the John le Carré of our generation’ (a phrase plastered on all the paperback covers) and Herron acknowledged the debt, long before she said that, in the first Slough House book, Slow Horses (2010): one of the characters was given ‘le Carré’s collected ...”

“... only in the South. The government sought to destroy King’s reputation. With the authorisation of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the FBI listened in on his phone calls with close associates and planted informers in his circle. Convinced the civil rights movement was a communist plot, J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men gathered recordings of his trysts with women ...”

“... Marlowe, the Shakespeare of Coriolanus, the Milton of Paradise Lost, Byron, Shelley, Fielding and Scott. Most of these were more widely read in pre-Civil War America than were any male American writers. With some notable exceptions early on, like F.O. Matthiessen, Marius Bewley and Leslie Fiedler, in Harold Bloom’s critical admixture of Emerson and ...”

“... of my childhood. 10 February. Finish with some regret Frances Spalding’s book on the Pipers, John and Myfanwy, the latter figuring in The Habit of Art where she is to some extent disparaged. I’ve always been in two minds about Piper, liking him when I was young with his paintings ‘modern’ but representational enough to be acceptable, a view I ...”

“... both the intimacy and the opacity of dialect. He thinks the ‘Scotch Novels’ of Sir Walter Scott are unreadable, and that this effect was calculated.) Among the invented terms are some that deserve to catch on. Fisher speaks of the ‘dark screen narration’ with which Hemingway leaves a reader to fill out scenes of dialogue that have been shorn of ...”

“... protective suavity, the counterfeit of impeccable logic or a minute calibration of fashion. John Berryman once said to a friend: ‘Doesn ‘t reading Stendhal make you feel intelligent!’ The same is true of Hazlitt; and the justified praise of Paulin’s book is that the compliment to our amour-propre survives his exploration to a generous ...”

“... of corporate identities and sub-identities makes it easy to pass the buck. According to Mark Scott, a solicitor with Bhatt Murphy, ‘You ask the Home Office about medical services and they say they subcontract them to GSL. You ask GSL and they say they subcontract to Primecare Forensic Medical. Privatisation makes it difficult because so many ...”

“... coveted on the right. The court’s thinking is detailed in a majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, concurring opinions by Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and dissents by Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.* Roberts held that the admissions programmes at Harvard and UNC ran afoul of the equal protection clause of the ...”

“... it was very reassuring but also a bit ominous.’The Irish Sea: ‘Fish don’t do borders’ (John Lynch, a fisherman, quoted in the Irish Times, 14 December 2018).Jeremy Corbyn: ‘Delusional’ (Irish Independent, 12 December 2018). ‘The fact that there has been no leadership from Corbyn on Brexit will be something the party and the country may rue ...”

“... the favoured colonial minority was always the Islamic one. Perhaps this was because, as Paul Scott has one of his characters say in The Raj Quartet, the British ‘prefer Muslims to Hindus (because of the closer affinity that exists between God and Allah than exists between God and the Brahma)’. The character is Harry Coomer or Hari Kumar, ground ...”

“... a firm most notable for creating the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who, in 2004, derailed John Kerry’s presidential campaign by claiming he had been falsely decorated as a war hero. CRC – it stands for Creative Response Concepts – is also the publicist for the Federalist Society, which, in the Trump era, has successfully promoted the appointment ...”

“... His books appear to be conceived on the principle laid down by Dr Greenslade at the beginning of John Buchan’s The Three Hostages, as the proper way to write a ‘shocker’: ‘The author writes the story inductively, and the reader follows it deductively ... I begin by fixing on one or two facts which have no obvious connection ... imagine anything you ...”

“... Western Trains guilty of a breach of the Health and Safety at Work Act in July 1999, Mr Justice Scott Baker said he thought this ‘an astonishing conclusion’. The driver involved in the Southall accident was travelling at over 100 mph, and passed the distance between the first warning signal and the red stop signal in less than 45 seconds. He may have ...”

“... doubleness ministers to social vigilance, not to solitary complacency. In The Figure of Echo, John Hollander has recently unfolded a contrariety in Chapter 26 of the Book of Proverbs: Answer not a tool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. Each of these ...”