“... Moriarty opposite old Burma hand and fully accredited special agent Nayland Smith – Sherlock Holmes with a face ‘sun-baked to the hue of coffee’ – and stalwart Dr (of course) Petrie, who, like his Baker Street predecessor, tells the story and gets the girl. Nayland Smith and Petrie exist in a state of wildly malfunctioning cliché: ‘His eyes were ...”

“... sophisticated seekers after the purely indigenous origins of American fiction, as in the work of Richard Poirier (A World Elsewhere) or R.W.B. Lewis (The American Adam). One can see how smoothly Faulkner’s concentration on one obscure corner of Mississippi fits into this regionalist-patriotic pattern. His latest biographer says on his first page: ‘He is ...”

“... generals are said to have been horrified when Sargent opened Thayer’s valise. According to Richard Murray of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the prototype garment resembled an old hunting jacket, trailing strips of coloured cloth and daubed with patches of colour that reflected Thayer’s interest in harlequin costumes. It’s not clear whether ...”

“... Hornung realised that for artistic purposes the great villain needs a worshipper, just as every Holmes must have his Watson, and so Bunny is born alongside Raffles, and with him that intense relationship ‘passing the love of women’, although modern readers have more often thought of Oscar and Bosie than David and Jonathan.And here the plot thickens, in ...”

“... inflected, full of tiny, rapid, almost imperceptibly subtle flickers and changes of hue. Richard Holmes gives one of the accounts of biography I like best: the writer will never catch their subject, but might describe the pursuit of that fleeting figure. I would like to let her go.Among recent books consulted in the writing of this ...”

“... and self-discipline, and a deep hatred of the United States and the Western way of life. As Richard Hofstader and others have argued, for more than two hundred years this kind of combination has always acted as a prompt for paranoid and reactionary conspiracy theories, most of them groundless. Now the threat is real; and for the foreseeable future we ...”

“... desire to build a ‘Brasilia of the North’ on top of the Newcastle town centre laid out by Richard Grainger in the 1830s. It is urbanity in and of itself that attracts Hatherley. On his road trip to Glasgow he remarks (one assumes the humour is unintentional) that the first thing he notices in the purlieus of the motorway is ‘space ...”

“... of the Blue Carbuncle’, which opens with a diamond found in the craw of a Christmas goose. Holmes begins at the end and works towards the beginning, following in reverse the steps the goose and its prize must have taken, all the way back to the original theft. It’s very plodding. But the peculiarity of the hard-boiled detective thriller is that it ...”

“... press and an independent judiciary); by 1992, it was 35 per cent. He began his piece by quoting Richard Holbrooke on the previous year’s Bosnian elections: what if free and fair elections put in power ‘racists, fascists and separatists’? In The Light That Failed (2019), Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the ...”

“... Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore headphones; all you could hear was the giggles and gasps. On ...”

“... Maxwell is trying to buy a 10 per cent share in Fleet Holdings from the, Australian tycoon Robert Holmes a Court for £15.4 million, while another bidder – it’s not clear whether or not he is a rival to Maxwell – is an Egyptian financier: Dr Ashrat Marwan, son-in-law of the late President Nasser and confidant of the late President Sadat, has been ...”

“... prefer this arrangement. ‘What Congress wants isn’t power so much as deniability,’ Stephen Holmes has suggested. It is less interested in claiming a president’s successes than in disowning his failures. ‘He is sovereign​ who decides,’ in the words of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, and the American president’s bomb power is one of the purest ...”

“... A sentimental glow surrounds the Emancipation Proclamation, but in fact, as the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, it possessed all the ‘moral grandeur of a bill of lading’. It contained no criticism of slavery and did not free all slaves; the legal status of at least 800,000 slaves was not affected. The proclamation did not free those held ...”

“... as the baby’s middle name, and who gave the child the surname of her estranged husband, Richard Aldington, though he was not the father.But let’s back up: Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1886, the only daughter and second child of the second marriage of Charles Doolittle, professor of astronomy and mathematics and Civil War ...”

“... is a direct result of that unforgettable, unforgivable, life-shattering Tuesday morning. Stephen Holmes New York Islam was a medieval religion that had managed to stumble on into the 20th century. This was the view held in the 1950s by academic pundits in the West, such as Alfred Guillaume and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who wrote general guides to Islam. The ...”