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“... to that of You Can’t Win, Jack Black’s crim chapbook from 1926, which introduced the jejune William Burroughs to the outlaw lifestyle. The Badge is a breathlessly ingenuous account of Los Angeles’s competitive and notoriously corrupt law enforcement agencies in the 1940s and 1950s. Describing the last hours of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short – the ...”

“... suddenly, voices are heard, short and longwave sermons. LeBov (there’s an echo in his name of William Labov, pioneer of sociolinguistics, and of the Baal Shem Tov, Master of the Good Name, founder of Eastern Hasidism) believes the key to a cure is to be found in these voices, in their staticky messages that only forest Jews can decode. Samuel, who’d ...”

“... of Frances Stonor Saunders’s biography of Sir John Hawkwood (c.1320-94), one-time leader of the White Company made famous by Conan Doyle’s historical novels. The 14th century was indeed an age of opportunity for military adventurers, and for mercenary soldiers in particular. Independent companies, led by seasoned captains, and with their own internal ...”

“... Olusoga tells us, who worried about the fate of African conscripts in any struggle between white men in the unforgiving north. Above all there was the fear that racial hierarchies might be jeopardised in the colonies when the war ended. White South African settlers were adamant about this. It was madness, in their ...”

“... by Tony Adams (Arsenal centre-back, 1983-2002); and, now, Arsène Wenger’s My Life in Red and White. Arsène Wenger on the touchline at the Emirates Stadium, 29 March 2014. The Premier League has come a long way since it started nearly thirty years ago. Revenues for the 2018-19 season were more than £5 billion. It’s the most watched sports league ...”

“... and for the past’. But the Victorians had been going to the seaside in droves by the time William Frith started work on Ramsgate Sands in 1851, while the artists who are usually thought of as 20th-century neo-Romantics had hardly begun their careers when Woolf was a child. There are many good anecdotes in the history of the lighthouse, but not all of ...”

“... upset perceived dichotomies. He has compared Skippy Dies to the mix of ‘bubblegum pop’ and ‘white noise’ in the Sonic Youth song ‘JC’. For The Mark and the Void (2015), about the relationship between a banker called Claude and an amoral novelist called Paul Murray, he drew on Barthes’s analysis of mythologies and Nietzsche’s idea of ...”

“... that I could need £100. I’d go down there and he still wouldn’t pay me, and yet he’d have a white Rolls Royce with a chauffeur sitting outside waiting to take him wherever he wanted to go. But who says he paid the chauffeur? Not settling debts is hardly unheard of in Old Etonians. But Robert was a first-generation Etonian, and might conceivably have ...”

“... a few shades more sentimental and simplifying than the words inside. (Bowen in a 1968 letter to William Plomer at Cape: ‘Neither do I want any more of Miss Joan Cassell [sic].’)I read my way through quite a few of Bowen’s books, and when I finished I hardly knew what had happened in them. Her prose was sophisticated, her references depended on all ...”

“... ruined the interior.) I was overwhelmed. The photograph had naturally been taken in black and white; and my memory, feeding on such images as this, had begun to see my childhood in the same way, monochromatically. The colours of my history had seeped out of my mind’s eye; now my other two eyes were assaulted by colours, by the vividness of the red ...”

“... run, over and over, until it reveals its form. The new technology that speeds and simplifies the white-glove days of glue and acetate and celluloid pegged out like razored laundry has changed the nature of the game. The architecture of film has been displaced, but faster is not necessarily easier: it is like knitting with light. Emma Matthews reached the ...”

“... If​ you’ve been following White House briefings and mainstream US media over the past four years, you could be forgiven for thinking that Trump has radically rewritten US foreign policy. In fact, despite Trump’s pledges to extract American soldiers from foreign conflicts, troop numbers have barely fallen overall and have risen in the Persian Gulf ...”

“... advertise and illuminate other writers and artists. Peter Marshall does so in his new biography, William Godwin. Hazlitt’s vivid account of Godwin’s political importance appears on the first page of Marshall’s introduction, and his worthy book is studded with variations on ‘as Hazlitt rightly observed’. He accepts Hazlitt’s judgments as ...”

“... innovation of constructing an interlocking system of classes, terms and names was so significant, William Whewell argued in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), that modern systemic science could be said to begin with Linnaeus. Whewell wrote at a time when a wide variety of new lexical systems had been accepted as the matrices of scientific ...”

“... expert sufficiently aware of the intellectual currents to provide Parsons with accurate briefings. William Sullivan, US Ambassador to Iran during the crucial two years of the revolution, seems to have been better-informed in this respect, even if his understanding was superficial. ‘Shariati,’ he says, ‘attempted to reconcile socialism with Islam, and ...”