“... He might have ruined it with its women: the Toni Ware chapter in particular sounds like Cormac McCarthy breaking his hymen on horseback. (RIP.) He might have ruined it with his doubt, which caused him to turn somersaults like a cracked-out fairground child. (‘Is it showing off if you hate it?’ Hal Incandenza asks in Infinite Jest.) But it is there. The ...”

“... didn’t concern him. But before he wrote the poem he wrote an essay, ‘The Public v. the Late Mr William Butler Yeats’, set out as an argument between a public prosecutor and a counsel for the defence, in which the value of poetry is itself interrogated.The prosecutor makes little of Yeats’s engagement in ‘Easter 1916’: ‘After the rebellion of ...”

“... a few minutes and a small man emerged from the wings wearing full military uniform. His name was William Pekrul. He was 98 years old and the father of eleven children. Pekrul had served in Normandy, and he spoke with zeal and punched the air in support of the American ideal. Everybody stood, just as they had for the ‘Gold Star Families’ who lost serving ...”

“... as the United Public Workers and the American Labor Party – earned her a thick file during the McCarthy era. She was put under surveillance by the FBI, had to declare that she wasn’t a communist – she wasn’t – and was repeatedly interrogated by the State Department’s Loyalty Security Board.) At the height of the Cold War in the early ...”

“... as a major writer, the poète maudit of black America. Like his mentor Faulkner (and later Cormac McCarthy), Himes appealed to a Parisian readership convinced of the essential savagery of American life. ‘What the great body of Americans most disliked’ about his work, Himes believed, ‘was the fact that I came too close to the truth.’ He wasn’t wrong ...”

“... was not to be wrung out of himself, but rather to be discovered by other means, and other men. William Blackstone, Commentaries If you were sitting down today to set out the principles of a good system of criminal justice, with a blank sheet of paper and all the wisdom of hindsight at your disposal, you would probably start, as I would, with the principle ...”

“... on 1 June, on Dunkirk’s perimeter canal, where he and his troop were reunited with Major A.O. McCarthy, the battery commander, a regular army officer attached to the Territorials. A Troop’s guns were set up on the inside bank of the canal, from where they fired their last barrage until their supply of ammunition was exhausted. The troop then ...”

“... personal maid in the last years of her life, said in Marilyn Monroe – Confidential, written with William Stadiem. Clearly she spotted a fellow traveller in Weatherby. When she went after him – ‘I’ve seen you talk to everyone but me’ – charming him is not what she had in mind, but something more like an exposé of the dirty side of ...”

“... magazines of the New York intellectuals, went to cocktail parties with Lionel Trilling and Mary McCarthy, and kept quiet about his identity and his politics. His parents, who were themselves estranged from Palestine (his father said Jerusalem reminded him of death), were relieved that their moody and contentious son was showing such prudence. Thanks to his ...”

“... hostess Muriel Draper, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Nancy Mitford, Dawn Powell, even Mary McCarthy, whose rivalrousness towards other intellectual women is legendary. The fact that Murphy seems to have been one of the kindliest people on earth no doubt only magnified her attractiveness. Though lacking scholarly training (like Virginia Woolf, Murphy ...”

“... The relevant passage was an account of a conversation between Gladstone’s home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, and a police chief. While Clarke was being moved from prison to prison, Harcourt had refused to countenance the idea that he and the others were political prisoners and insisted that they be treated as common felons. (Harcourt generally took a ...”