“... else would listen to. At its worst the press can be a source of prejudice that, as the case of the Taylor sisters powerfully demonstrates, actually promotes miscarriages of justice. Between these poles its activity, both up-market and down-market, is often debatable. For example, in my view it now has a good deal to answer for in relation to the 1991 Criminal ...”

“... be asked and complaints pursued and (sometimes) compensation obtained without going to law. Arthur Taylor’s useful essay contrasts the reasonably swift and productive hospital complaints procedure with the often complicated and frustrating family health service procedure when the complaint is against a GP. He looks also at the Health Service ombudsman, whose ...”

“... was published. The problems at the infirmary had become public largely through the efforts of Stephen Bolsin, a consultant anaesthetist with an interest in clinical audit, a process in which clinicians’ outcomes are measured. Bolsin became worried about the competence of these two surgeons to perform some of the more risky operations on small ...”

“... happen all over again). For evidence of this, one could do worse than consult The Mask of Anarchy, Stephen Ellis’s meticulously detailed attempt to understand how it was that young men dressed in wigs and bathrobes could eat the heart of a fellow human being in the belief that it would protect them from their enemies. Cannibalism was a persistent feature of ...”

“... to consider the opportunities there by his extremely wealthy and successful cousin Simon Taylor. Taylor, according to Lady Nugent, the governor’s wife, ‘had a numerous family, some almost on every one of his estates’. Tailyour began a relationship with an enslaved woman, Polly, born Mary Graham, who was ...”

“... he with this empty trope that he rearranges it several times within the next four pages. Elizabeth Taylor sitting up late at night is presumed to be ‘watching the falling stars with a certain sense of sympathetic identification’, while other guests show contempt on discovering that ‘Jagger, despite the waves of women he had rolled through, could not swim ...”

“... dominant, or most recurrent, styles in American writing have been the rhapsodic and the paranoid. Stephen Fender’s excellent book points directly to what we might call the organising ambiguity of American literature by bringing together in his title ‘plotting’ and the ‘West’. A specific geographical West, to be sure – his (superbly annotated) book ...”

“... It can sometimes seem that the Second World War never stopped. Stephen Spender alluded recently in the London Review to the idea that it was simply a continuation of the First, but the ‘Thirty Years’ War’ view of 20th-century history has in turn to accommodate some of the later continuities of which one is reminded by both Mordecai Richler’s anthology and Ernestine Schlant and Thomas Rimer’s collection of essays ...”

“... and ‘servile court-tool’ who ‘goes the whole length of despotism’. Then there was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom John Thelwall – a 1790s firebrand who did stick to his guns – remembered as being, in the heyday of Robespierre and Saint-Just, ‘a down right zealous leveller & indeed in one of the worst senses of the word … a Jacobin, a man of ...”

“... provenance’, but never quite decides what it does seek to be. Judicious selections from Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet extend the anthology’s reach beyond what Ricks terms ‘our precious stones from Land’s End to John o’Groats, leave alone the emerald of Ireland’. On the other hand, the editorial policy excludes ‘the British Empire or the ...”

“... sphinx without a secret,’ said Truman Capote; ‘the Ecce Homo of modern exhibitionism,’ said Stephen Spender. For his own part, Warhol was intensely reasonable: ‘I just want to be a machine,’ he said. There were many Andies: the Andy who brought cruelty back into art; the Andy who worried about ‘boy trouble’; the Andy who saw to the heart of ...”

“... ban; the fulminations against ‘shit-hole countries’; the gulag archipelago that his adviser Stephen Miller created for undocumented immigrants, in which children were separated from their parents and some women forced to undergo invasive vaginal examinations that reportedly resulted in sterilisation; and, not least, the violent dispersal of a Black ...”

“... disloyalty to the troops. Then the Whig Party confirmed its meretriciousness by nominating Zachary Taylor, a returning general, as its presidential candidate for 1848. Lincoln campaigned for Taylor, a Louisiana slaveholder, but was passed over for an appointment when Taylor captured the ...”

“... which Oxford-modern resolves by printing ‘busil’est’ – an emendation duly defended in Stephen Orgel’s excellent single-play Oxford version2 (‘my thoughts of Miranda are most active when I am busiest at my work’). The Oxford-original gives ‘busielest’ as what the compositor or possibly the scribe misread or wrongly divided in an attempt ...”

“... in the engagement, or ‘troth-plighting’, of their daughter Mary to one of their apprentices, Stephen Belott. Some years later Belott sued Mountjoy for an unpaid dowry of £60, and Shakespeare was among those called to give evidence at the Court of Requests in Westminster. He did so on 11 May 1612, though – somewhat conveniently for Mountjoy – he ...”