“... killing the wife who betrayed him while he was at war. The murderer in Chandler’s script was the William Bendix character, Ladd’s war buddy, an amnesiac killer suffering from blackouts: playing Smerdyakov to Alan Ladd’s Ivan Karamazov, Bendix, as Chandler puts it, ‘executed his pal’s wife’. Although the studio invented another murderer ex machina ...”

“... do no more than mark that wildness’s grave. Being by trade a poet of plain language – William Carlos Williams would be another hero, also George Oppen, also Eileen Myles – Nelson finds her artistic focus drawn in two main directions. On the one hand, she crafts her words until she gets them to ‘facet’ as accurately as she can: ‘How to ...”

“... and endured. Wolff sidestepped Postmodern elders such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Paul Metcalf, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of ...”

“... At different pitches and with different timbres, this refrain has been part of the Joe McCarthy movement, the George Wallace campaign and every Republican surge from Nixon to Gingrich. (But let’s not be too partisan about it; the rhetoric evolved from the days when the Ku Klux Klan and the Southern Democratic Party were each other’s official ...”

“... haunted the pages of Time, while in Battle for the Mind (1957), the British psychologist William Sargent noted the Third Reich’s penchant for mass brainwashing: ‘Hitler never concealed his method, which included deliberately producing such phenomena by organised excitement and mass hypnotism, and even boasted how easy it was to impose “the lie ...”

“... his native Wisconsin (which, had it happened, would have pitted him against future senator Joseph McCarthy). Welles was also touted as a senatorial candidate in California, though he evidently changed his mind when Senator Hiram Johnson died during the summer of 1945. At the height of the 1946 election season (which ended with the Republicans regaining ...”

“... of editors on the look-out. He’s invited to write reviews for the New Yorker, whose editor, William Shawn, was as Jamesian a figure as Lionel Trilling, a mandarin of almost excruciating courtesy and subtle indirection, riddled with phobias. Podhoretz prided himself, as well he might, on being the only young man to write for both Partisan Review and the ...”

“... uncertainties.’When she discovered that Lowell was with Blackwood, she wrote to her friend Mary McCarthy: ‘I knew Cal [Lowell] had a girl and had been distressed for some time, but it was just this afternoon that I knew it was Caroline. I felt such relief and burst out laughing! … I cannot take her seriously for Cal. There is a comic element to me in ...”

“... can one object, except aesthetically, to the silly term ‘Camelot’. Mrs Kennedy did indeed tell William Manchester, for a fawning profile that he wrote just after the assassination, that her late husband – who loathed the classical music soirées that she arranged at the White House for artists like Pablo Casals – had thoroughly enjoyed the mediocre ...”

“... in New York earned just $1.12 a week, even lower than factory work.A pill compounder called Dr William Evans had premises on her street. Evans sold pills for everything from constipation to ‘low spirits’ to ‘hypochondriacism’ (this seems an especially clever wheeze). Evans has an air of Doctor Dulcamara in Donizetti’s 1832 opera L’Elisir ...”

“... Culture’s got to go’ (the course, they meant – but it sounded more ominous than that). William Bennett, Secretary for Education, also came to visit the campus. He is the author of To reclaim a heritage: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education (1984). Bennett thought that Western Culture had to stay and said so, face to face with Stanford’s ...”

“... at Reykjavik ‘resembled as nothing else the 1905 meeting between Tsar Nicholas II and Kaiser William II’. But the real difficulty is that to get at the kind of answers a historian of the Cold War now requires calls for access to the Russian archives. Before the war ended it was reasonable to act as if that day would never come. Now, to everyone’s ...”

“... After working​ on his film adaptation of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1991), David Cronenberg apotheosised both the writer and himself by claiming his screenwriting and Burroughs’s literary style had synergised. Cronenberg apparently mused that were Burroughs to die he might write his next novel. Burroughs expired in 1997, and although Cronenberg has directed many films since then – operas too – while dabbling in graphic novels and other writings, Consumed is his first full-length work of fiction ...”

“... as sophisticated and as consistent in their styles, worldviews, personal ‘signatures’ as, say, William Faulkner – and thanks to Cahiers, few cinephiles would today think of disputing that. They were, however, less successful in their wager in the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of modern French radicalism, that film criticism should be written ‘as ...”

“... an important undercurrent of American politics, resurfacing in even more potent form in the McCarthy era). Anarchist violence had ebbed and the government’s abusive tactics during the Palmer raids had been widely condemned by such influential figures as Frankfurter and his Harvard Law School colleagues, Roscoe Pound and Zechariah Chafee; Louis ...”