“... to a journalist (‘We hate you’) but relented when I promised not to use his name. (‘I’ll sue you if you do. I’ll go to the Free Speech Union.’) He told me he made online videos under a pseudonym. ‘Discord? Reddit?’ I asked, trying to sound as though I knew what I was talking about. He laughed. ‘Reddit? That left-wing cesspool?’ I would ...”

“... military regime and the Revolutionary United Front: between 1991 and 1995, Sierra Leone’s debt rose from 1.3 to 1.4 billion dollars, which could not account for the drastic deterioration in debt service ratio unless exports had plunged – and that is exactly what happened, as rebel activity and an unscrupulous army ate into civilian productive ...”

“... than their predecessors to claim the historical importance of exceptions, of those women who rose to heights despite unpromising conditions, they are turning their attention to other kinds of women. On the other hand, to put the spotlight on the near-invisible one might have to resort to desperate or deluding rhetoric, as do several of the contributors ...”

“... having taken the news that he was a possible traitor very personally. Philby had threatened to sue any British newspaper that implied he was a double agent, but Hoover suggested to a couple of friendly American journalists that they take a look at him, and in October 1955, the New York Sunday Daily News named Philby openly for the first time. There was ...”

“... the class, and the more established the graduates, the larger the gift – the proffered funds rose easily into millions of dollars – until we reached the ageing students of the late 1960s. Suddenly, the big numbers evaporated. The class of 1973, my class, managed just 5 per cent of the total raised by the class of 1998. The children of the 1960s had ...”

“... men, Proust and Elvis, Muhammad Ali and the Beatles, are grouped around an unfolding, vulval red rose. The only woman depicted is Jackie Kennedy in the open car, pink pillbox hat turned towards her husband as he clutches his throat. II is all women, soft-porn pin-ups surrounding a stark, full-frontal nude with pubic hair, all set against the landscape garden ...”

“... get a solicitor’s letter and rather more surprised when it became clear that Francis intended to sue the magazine. We settled with him, but it was clear to me that he had wanted a court case. I thought at the time that he had wanted his name cleared of Nazi and anti-semitic connections once and for all, but I am no longer sure about that. In 1981, with the ...”

“... that he was indeed wearing a mask, but not when reporters were around.The story does not end: Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses tweets that Steve Mnuchin is an ‘asshole’ after the secretary of the Treasury tells Fox Business that it is ‘a great time for people to explore America’. Mnuchin, apparently preoccupied with checking his popularity on social media ...”

“... if Waller could have summoned the discipline to write more songs as fine as his ‘Honeysuckle Rose’, ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’, ‘Keeping out of Mischief Now’, ‘Jitterbug Waltz’ and ‘Blue Turning Grey over You’, he still couldn’t have come close to satisfying the demands placed on him by his own success and the executives at RCA ...”

“... flee Be thou as the Hairt tae me Upon the high hill Bethery Blintering floor o’ Sharon’s rose Like glaur and stoor warld’s glory goes Tae haud nor bield it nae man knows ... For all their delicacy, such poems look antiquated alongside MacDiarmid’s, who meant not to raise Lazarus but to say in Scots what could not be said in English. Davidson’s ...”

“... when Wilde entered the Hogarth Club ‘an old member of the club, ostentatiously staring at Wilde, rose from his chair and made for the door. One or two other members also got up. Everyone felt uncomfortable.’ In January 1891, six months after the magazine publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and three months before it came out in book form, Constance ...”

“... and legs. A child came and sowed turquoises round the outline of her body in the ground, and she rose up again as a horse of magic with a golden mane, and galloped across the sky. But White’s fiction stops here. Having written about her childhood at Roehampton’s exclusive Convent of the Sacred Heart, from which she believed she had been expelled at 14 ...”

“... invitation for a side-by-side rebuttal, Goldhagen instead enlisted a London law firm to sue Birn and Cambridge University Press for ‘many serious libels’. Demanding an apology, a retraction and an undertaking that Birn not repeat her criticisms, Goldhagen’s lawyers then threatened that ‘the generation of any publicity on your part as a ...”

“... funny. By contrast, the film’s star, Dion DiMucci, he of Dion and the Belmonts (‘Run around Sue’, ‘The Wanderer’) had been performing for five. They had come of age at the beginning of the 20th century; their kinetic low comedy incarnated its dynamism. Two generations later, the Republic was winded; manic hijinks had lost its prestige and its ...”

“... which he had purchased from the shadowy Saudi arms trader Adnan Khashoggi. Trump threatened to sue a journalist at the Wall Street Journal for accurately reporting his collapse, one of his many attempts to intimidate the press, and another technique he learned from Roy Cohn.‘Wa-a-a-a-h! – Little Donald, Unhappy At Last – Trump’s Final ...”