“... snared rabbits, and they were rendered in prose that aspired to the sparse behaviourism of Cormac McCarthy. You could call this constellation of interests ‘masculinity’, but if so, it was a masculinity undercut by a degree of irony (a collection of short stories from 2021 was titled Male Tears) and by a wistful, at times even sentimental, reverence for ...”

“... Meiling was an honoured figure both in Taipei and among a faction in Washington led by Joe McCarthy and right-wing Republicans such as Senator William Jenner of Indiana, egged on in their pursuit of those who ‘lost China’ by Luce’s magazines. But her poor relations with Chiang’s son, Ching-kuo, counted ...”

“... to God. Then tea. Then bed.Sharp was the main inspiration for the title character of Sweet William, a multi-tasker in the sex department. I thought this novel her ‘sunniest’ when it was published in 1975. Yet it ends in loss and chaos. Bainbridge effects an extraordinary trick of the light: the gloomy bits of plotting are scrambled together, so ...”

“... new Lurie doesn’t resemble a Bradbury or Lodge, or for that matter an early Lurie, so much as William Boyd’s Stars and Bars, which also investigates how members of one Anglophone culture don’t merely observe but exploit the other one. The protagonists in the new Lurie and Boyd novels are diffident people in mid-life, misfits or at least ...”

“... wearing earrings. Mind you, even in the butch 1940s Mickey Rooney, Vincent Price, Clifton Webb and William Powell played nearer to the other end of the man’s men spectrum, to appreciative audiences. To say nothing of pretty-boys Cary Grant and Leslie Howard. Kanfer doesn’t by any means dismiss the argument, but he isn’t sure that loss of American ...”

“... gender). Hemingway’s style, with its anti-aestheticising aesthetic, is still influential. Cormac McCarthy dispenses with the apostrophe in shortened forms like ‘doesnt’ and ‘wouldnt’, though the need for clarity requires him to keep it in ‘can’t’, with the result that the impression of imperative sparseness suffers, chafing so inconsistently ...”

“... control, that its own actions and misperceptions played a vital role in shaping Soviet behaviour. William Taubman, one of the most astute recent students of Soviet foreign policy (and himself a critic of many revisionist assumptions), has presented a far more persuasive picture in his excellent book Stalin’s American Policy (1982), which Thomas cites in ...”

“... sciences as ‘akin to pederasty among priests’. Two New York Times science journalists – William Broad and Nicholas Wade – were outraged at what they saw as bland indifference to the problem on the part of leaders of the scientific community, and in 1982 they published a book – Betrayers of the Truth – that alleged widespread fraud and judged ...”

“... Also cited in the FHA investigation was Fred Trump’s partner, contractor and financier William ‘Willie’ Tomasello, who according to the federal Organised Crime Task Force was associated with elements of both the Gambino and Genovese families.Fred Trump appeared to be grooming Fred Jr to take over his business. But he was a harsh and exigent ...”

“... Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage and William Carlos Williams, and there are two ‘letters of protest’, the second written in a sort of Finneganese, and long thought to have been the work of Joyce himself, or ‘Germ’s Choice’, as the writer calls him. It turns out that the apparently invented ...”

“... after the influx of Protestant refugees from Ireland. At Westminster, Pym emerges as the Senator McCarthy of the Puritan Revolution. He and his allies, who ‘were in no position to distinguish between truth and rumour and had no desire to do so’, ‘relentlessly propagated and pursued’ a ‘fundamental misconception’ about Court politics. Of ...”

“... and daring, of charisma and catastrophe, than an American pilgrim whose journey has taken him from William Buckley’s conservative bastion at the National Review to Harold Hayes’s soft-core liberal stronghold at Esquire, and from a Jesuit seminary to the Henry Luce Chair of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University? At its ...”

“... companies, fearing boycotts, declared that the industry would not employ Communists. William Wyler, John Huston and Phillip Dunne marshalled prominent liberals into a ‘Committee for the First Amendment’ to support the blacklisted; it promptly collapsed. (One member, Humphrey Bogart, went so far as to appear over the banner ‘I’m no ...”

“... not listen. It would have been natural to turn instead to the director of the CIA, but this was William Casey, a former businessman and Nixon aide who had been controversially appointed by Reagan as the reward for managing his 1980 election campaign. As the intelligence professionals working with the executive saw it, Casey was reckless, uninformed, and ...”

“... idea of literature, and a peculiar division of labour between writer and reader. Their author, William Gaddis, who won the National Book Award with JR, might actually have felt short-changed by the accolade of the imprint, to judge by a riff in JR deploring the way ‘longer works of fiction [are] now dismissed as classics and … largely unread due to the ...”