“... his notes: ‘And are you still drinking two bottles of wine a day?’ Some of the best things in Richard Klein’s brilliant, wayward book Eat Fat* are about the way in which the medical profession rushes after certain facts and conclusions while phlegmatically ignoring others. The medical received wisdom which particularly gets his goat is to do with the ...”

“... It is highly likely that these pheromones are what the bedbug-sniffer dog detects. Two firms in Florida train them, usually using animals rescued from shelters. One firm prefers beagle mixes, the other labrador retriever mixes. Bold claims are made for their success. New York City is hiring two, and Lola, a Jack Russell bitch, has been imported into the ...”

“... degree in counselling. The only steady work she could find (this was in 2008) was with the Florida Department of Corrections, providing mental health support to the third largest prison population in the US. In recent decades, the number of incarcerated people with mental health needs in Florida’s prisons has grown ...”

“... unsettling realisation that the colonists were justified in their complaints. From Edmund Burke to Richard Price, observers across the political spectrum struggled to see much evidence of British liberty in the crass mismanagement that led to the Revolution. Some even followed Jefferson, who in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence blamed Britain ...”

“... to build careers on the blacklist. The virus that would surface decades later, disguised as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, began here. Fault lines in the American psyche are most obvious at the interface of showbiz saccharine and the political process: Monroe’s birthday tribute to JFK, Sinatra as MC at the Kennedy White House, late-liberal ...”

“... a merchant, and his wife, Ardesee, a sewing-machine sales assistant. Myron, too, moved often: Florida, Canada, California. For a few years, the family disappears from the record. As a teenager, Crippen was apprenticed to a homeopathic doctor whose practice was on the ground floor of their apartment building in San José, and he went on to the University ...”

“... pre-teen murder and child abuse (the Attorney-General Janet Reno brought that obsession from Florida to ignite the conflagration at Waco) and sponsor regulation of the family relations of the poor. Like Gingrich and Bob Dole, Clinton proposes to help poor children by ending their entitlement to even minimal welfare support. Although Alexander Cockburn ...”

“... the great swamp of history,’ he explains. One of the tempests Doc writes about in Songs is the Florida criminal trial of dishevelled Palm Beach heiress and cocaine slut Roxanne Pulitzer, and his words on that abominable scene richly echo the gnarled politics that have both paralysed America as a whole and effectively crippled the one thing that Doc holds ...”

“... Dealer. The man who started this frivolous auction was William Safire, former speechwriter to Richard Nixon and now columnist for the New York Times. He it was who, during the dismal days of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, came up with ‘Koreagate’, ‘Peanutgate’, ‘Billygate’ and – his own favourite, concerning some fiddle of government expenses ...”

“... have already started to raise this issue, stirred up in part by the insulting language used by Richard Perle and his school about the caution of the professional military. As a recent letter to the Washington Post put it, ‘the men described as chicken hawks avoided military service during the Vietnam War while supporting that war politically. They are ...”

“... a Russian adviser in Cuba for his LaCoste shirt; murdered the American captain who brought him to Florida for ‘complaining’. And once landed, and a new American himself, he continues murdering with no more compunction than he dances. Both are natural to him. The novel is inward with this reptile, but he is beyond understanding: a force of evil which can ...”

“... The map Allen funded arose from the ‘Fifty Reefs’ project, a philanthropic initiative led by Richard Vevers, an ex-advertising executive who now runs a ‘creative agency’ for ocean conservation, focusing on coral reefs. Vevers persuaded a group of researchers to use modern portfolio theory – usually applied to stocks and shares – to identify fifty ...”

“... including Joe McCarthy and George Wallace. Not to mention more respectable types such as Richard Nixon, whose ‘Southern strategy’ offered a blueprint for mobilising white resentment over the gains of the Civil Rights movement. (That ‘respectable’ and ‘Nixon’ can be included in the same sentence illustrates how far our political standards ...”

“... circumvented the King-quota limit by bringing out five surplus horror tales under the pseudonym ‘Richard Bachman’. Unfortunately the Bachman books’ disguise was eventually penetrated. But, more significantly, their appeal was drastically altered when their true authorship was publicised. As King observed, Thinner sold 28,000 by ...”

“... last great cause’ is echoed in the reminiscences of the international volunteers quoted in Richard Baxell’s exhaustive study, Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle against Fascism. John Bassett, who served in the International Brigades for nine months, from March 1938 until they were disbanded that ...”