“... to Nancy Drew or Tom Sawyer as an ‘innocent abroad’. Badlands was loosely based on the case of Charles Starkweather, who went on a killing spree in Nebraska and Wyoming in the late 1950s together with his teenage girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. In the movie Holly meets Kit (Martin Sheen) in a South Dakota town: ‘Little did I realise,’ she tells us over ...”

“... Who Killed Aleksander Pushkin? (Not, we learn, his duelling partner and brother-in-law, George-Charles D’Anthès, but a grassy-knoll-style hitman hiding in the bushes.) And when you finally get to Pushkin, you’re liable to be told that if you don’t speak Russian you can’t get to him anyway, because it’s not his prose that makes him great. His ...”

“... runner. His health remained poor, and he left Uppingham early to be packed off to Australia in the hope that the climate would mend his lungs. He worked as a tutor to start with, then spent much of his two years Down Under in sheep stations in the outback. The whole experience shaped the rest of his life. As a bespectacled young jackaroo just out from England ...”

“... his poetry is least negotiable in the hands of people who read it on the look-out for what they hope to find there. He knew himself to be a great poet, a man privileged to receive the awesome and often close to terrifying visitations of genius. It is about the gestations of that poetry that he most often writes, as if in wonderment at his own ...”

“... People” could not be relied on to be invariably just, compassionate and righteous.’ Charles Taylor put forward a similar analysis in Hegel (1975), though he had fewer regrets about the obsolescence of ‘the Enlightenment vision of society’ with its self-sufficient individuals pursuing an atomised agenda of individualistic rights. Lyotard ...”

“... of day when temperatures normally rise) when the temperature measured by an official sensor at Charles de Gaulle Airport suddenly jumped by five degrees to 22°C. No culprit has been identified, but there was speculation on French meteorology forums that a battery-powered hairdryer may have been involved.Mischief is one thing, but the incident makes one ...”

“... relationship with the Lacanian enterprise entered a new phase. He went into analysis with Charles Melman, a prominent Freudian School analyst. Now, on his way to becoming an analyst, he could present himself as the legitimate heir not only of Lacan’s science but of his analytic kingdom as a whole, and would then be in the best position possible to ...”

“... Brothers, Tessie O’Shea, Milton Babbitt, The Rough Guide to Rai, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Charles Trenet, Ska Almighty, John Dowland, the organ music of Johann Fux (heh heh), Ian Bostridge, the Ramones, Astor Piazzola, Ethel Merman’s Disco Album, Magnetic Fields, Flagstad and Svanholm in Die Walküre, Lord Kitchener and the Calypso All-Stars, Sonic ...”

“... Hague, Duncan Smith and Howard – who were sworn opponents of Maastricht, none with any hope of winning an election. In government, Blair’s initial doubts about the single currency, prompted by the hostility to the euro of the Murdoch press that had helped elect him, soon faded. But Gordon Brown’s firm refusal to abandon sterling, made from his ...”

“... to declare the crisis over in the summer of 1847.’ O Grada has analysed the papers of Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, and suggests that, throughout these years, Trevelyan believed that the ‘Famine had been ordained by God to teach the Irish a lesson, and therefore should not be too much interfered with’. As early as ...”

“... a hair-raising frolic indeed: Bobsy was president of the Arts Club of Chicago and her husband, Charles Barnett Goodspeed, the trustee in question, a prominent Chicago businessman related to one of the founders of the university, Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed. Bob Hutchins’s partisans gossip to this day about Maude’s psychic frailties. In a 1990 ...”

“... grand plan of give and take, sufficiency for rich and poor alike, begins to come apart. This, as Charles Tripp explains in Islam and the Moral Economy, is also a challenge to ‘the balance and proportion of God’s ordering of the universe’, which must be reflected in ‘human relations’. Islamic tradition warns that riba is likely to lead to injustice ...”

“... It can’t really be a principle of construction, though that sometimes seems to be Gaddis’s hope. Chapter IX of Part II, for instance, is relatively compact, not even twenty pages, and in outline promises no end of drama. At Christmas the Reverend Gwyon finally commits to Mithras rather than Christ, modifies his church, overcomes the bull in single ...”

“... literary side-lines: as well as poetry, fiction and biography, he wrote the words for ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, edited Queen Victoria’s letters, and was the author of a series of reflective works on the nature of life and happiness that sold in the hundreds of thousands. He was twice incapacitated by severe depression, and only in those years broke off ...”

“... ago, because of the financial crisis but also to look for his daughter, and he refuses to abandon hope: ‘I still believe my daughter is alive. We’re trying to put pressure on the authorities to find her. We’re also trying to investigate by ourselves. But we don’t have the money, not even for a soda.’ The maquiladoras where many of the missing girls ...”