“... chrome is see-your-face; theirs is in-your-face. It’s a loweringly humid afternoon on which four white men are standing trial in a city courthouse accused of depriving a black man of his civil rights, especially the right not to be batoned following traffic violations. The sheriff’s car with which I have been making tender eye-contact in the rear-view ...”

“... was foregone and the trial – of Socrates for inculcating unofficial ideas in the young; of the white men arraigned before an all-white Mississippi jury for the abduction and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till; of Sir Walter Raleigh for an imaginary treason – simply a public enunciation and endorsement of it. That at ...”

“... mentioned advantage has made up for all disadvantages.’ In Bienville’s Dilemma, the geographer Richard Campanella writes that the site ‘made perfect, rational sense at the time of its founding – a time when man depended heavily on waterborne transportation, and when this particular site offered the best waterborne access to what proved to be the ...”

“... semiotics and deconstruction. We have had analyses of his work by Charles Mauron, Jean-Pierre Richard, Robert Greer Cohn, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Leo Bersani, Malcolm Bowie and others. It might seem surprising, therefore, not to find a single full-length biography published between Henri Mondor’s 1941 Vie de Mallarmé and Gordon ...”

“... place in Marin County, California – ‘the golden land’ – in 1975, and many of those whom Richard Levine talked to claimed to have seen it coming, since it was well-known that Mrs Olive and her adopted daughter hated each other. Being a minor at the time, Marlene served only three years in a Youth Authority institution, and, now at liberty, has ...”

“... people who have had information about themselves embargoed: Princess Ashraf, Alexander Haig and Richard (‘Dick’) Helms. Manifestly evasive though the diaries are, they are nonetheless exceptionally illuminating on two issues: on the last years of the Shah’s regime, seen from the inside; and on how to try to nobble Britain’s media intelligentsia and ...”

“... is sufficiently good-humoured and various to accommodate a pleasingly disgusting horror story, ‘White Lies’, and a disarming comedy, ‘Algebra’, about a gentle homosexual who, to his own surprise, takes literary London by storm simply through flattering famous writers and inviting them round for little social evenings. If Theroux has a weakness, it is ...”

“... As she grows shabbier and thinner, the Americans in the village compare her to the witch in Snow White. But the thinness is sickness, and Kay, although her parents take their time to admit it, is tubercular. This plague also attacks the narrator, putting an end to his military service, and his camp university friend. It throws its shadow over the ...”

“... anti-vaxxer, QAnon, birtherism, Biden’s election ‘steal’.In the early 1960s, the historian Richard Hofstadter identified a ‘paranoid style’ in American political culture. The Whigs of the mid-19th century had emerged, at least in part, out of the Anti-Masonic Party, and the Republican Party that succeeded the Whigs in the 1850s was not only hostile ...”

“... Andrew Sullivan, ‘azza’ declarations – ‘as a colleague of David Simpson’; ‘as a white, middle-class male’ – in the age of identity politics. ‘Agonise’ is the right word here: every page of his book radiates anger, frustration and impotence at a situation in which the obsession with situation is itself the problem. For underlying the ...”

“... in Paris, but it is still the most impressive and among the most magisterially consistent. Richard Goy and Robert Berger, in their respective accounts of the construction of the Cà d’Oro and of Louis XIV’s Louvre, remove ambiguities which hang around the word ‘built’. They ask who made decisions, who paid, and how much, and why each building ...”

“... perpetually present – and never more so than in this almost incredibly vivid biography. Richard Holmes has a genius for the job, as he showed fifteen years ago in his biography of Shelley. In a sense, there is no need to bring Coleridge to life, but in this compelling narrative of those early years of the poet Holmes makes us seem actually to be ...”

“... warmed by the Moonies’ unconditional support for him during Watergate, invited Moon to the White House, where the two men prayed together. Nixon’s fall was a grievous blow to Moon, who immediately set out on a campaign of extreme right-wing agitation to reverse what he saw as the decline into leftism inaugurated by Watergate. The Moonie ...”

“... up for Boris Yeltsin, or for liberating Haiti, or for building a bridge (to coin a phrase) to Richard Nixon. It is ghastlier still to reflect on the germ of truth that lurks in each conceited anecdote. Of the White House staffers who did not trust him and with whom he wants to settle accounts, the most prominent two ...”

“... lookalike’ parodied in Within Our Gates to the deliberate echoes of the NAACP Secretary Walter White’s undercover investigation of Southern lynching, found in The Girl from Chicago; for Green, the rival entertainers in Swing represent Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters, the two poles of cultural autonomy and assimilation. In 1928, a combination of factors ...”