“... man-about-town is swallowed by a crocodile and then, from within the beast’s belly, threatens to sue its owner for damages. (I suspect that that crocodile had a hand or claw in the title Schulz gave to his first book.) Nothing would be easier than to make an anthology of striking descriptions and flights of fancy from this volume to illustrate both the ...”

“... violated is not to mobilise a democratic majority to change the law, but to look for someone to sue. Of course, as Jack Rakove points out in Original Meanings, precisely because of its centrality the Constitution has been a continuing source of dispute as well as a symbol of unity. Each generation reinvents the Constitution in its own image, and politicians ...”

“... and only the desk and the doorman are visible from my comfortable armchair. I then smoke my long black cigar in peace, in the dark: once a primeval bonfire in the clear of the forest, now a civilised ember glowing in the night like a beacon to the soul.’ All the same, he knows that rhapsody does not make a good read. Nor does connoisseurship or dogma, and ...”

“... of another suppression like The Rainbow. Then, after publication, Philip Heseltine threatened to sue over Lawrence’s portrait of him as ‘Halliday’, and Secker agreed to make further alterations – changing ‘fair hair’ to ‘black hair’, and the like. These changes are relevant to the history of censorship and ...”

“... interesting. Arthur Andersen is a proud survivor of the stampede of top accountancy firms to sue each other for alleged negligence in auditing and handling the accounts of clients who had gone bust in the recession of the early 1990s. Over the Barlow Clowes fiasco, the Government, represented by Ernst and Young, sued Touche Ross; over BCCI, Touche Ross ...”

“... Their strategy was encapsulated in what Milov calls a ‘pugnacious and pithy mantra’: ‘Sue the bastards.’ The litigious approach reflected frustration with the associational state, which allowed federal agencies as well as congressmen to become servants of the industries they were meant to be regulating. Litigation was the last resort of ...”

“... Largely thanks to Kidman’s performance, the film carries off the naughtiness required to make a black comedy truly funny as well as dark (compare Gus Van Sant’s previous outing, the woefully unfunny Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, starring an almost unwatchably whimsical Uma Thurman). To Die For was Ryan’s ‘might-have-been’: it was Kidman’s real ...”

“... Mind of Watts’, where, as against the ‘basic realities’, the ‘bitter realities’, of the black ghetto, Pynchon describes white Los Angeles as ‘that creepy world full of pre-cardiac Mustang drivers who scream insults at one another only when the windows are up; of large corporations where Nice-guyship is the standing order regardless of whose ...”

“... exploitable sets of a working life: railside Illinois, Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a film festival in Havana, San Francisco, Rome, Avignon, Paris, London, Colchester. That list comes in no particular order, but demonstrates a certain restlessness, and the gun-for-hire nature of academic near-employment ...”

“... of Salvador, Brazil’s first capital and its main port of entry for the slave trade, are black – all shades of black. Salvador is the capital of the state of Bahia, which is roughly the size of the United Kingdom, with a population of only 12.6 million. Salvador is built in two tiers, the upper and lower ...”

“... unprecedentedly ‘vicious’ criminal sentences for those convicted, especially when they were black youth. And so, too, with the police, and the courts, and schools and churches and social services, as explored in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and ...”

“... remarked, was inexhaustibly rich, but susceptible to constant reinterpretation and punctuated by black holes: events that the authorities at any given time preferred their subjects to forget. Selective amnesia is not unique to Russia: Ernest Renan pointed out long ago that national memories are constituted as much by forgetting as by remembering. What is ...”

“... a family).3 August (the day of Dad’s death, 41 years ago). To Gosford Street to record Sue MacGregor’s programme Reunion about the two series of Talking Heads. The best anecdote to come out of the first series was told me by Tony Cash, who heard A Lady of Letters translated on French radio. In the original version Miss Ruddock, talking about her ...”

“... Dreamland, by Sam Quinones, describes the rise of a super-efficient network of dealers of Mexican black tar heroin in the US and its effects on one particular town in Ohio. American Overdose, by Chris McGreal, a correspondent for the Guardian, offers a more detailed view of the corruption that enabled the spread of opiates to go unchecked by the healthcare ...”

“... took place in Paris, where Pound had a studio, and Lewis, impassive beneath his trademark wide black hat, seemed content to watch in silence. ‘Ezra had not been boxing very long and I was embarrassed at having him work in front of anyone he knew, and I tried to make him look as good as possible,’ Hemingway wrote. So wide was the margin between master ...”