“... of North America. Cook’s journals and the reports of other enlightened travellers, including William Marsden’s History of Sumatra (1783) and Arthur Young’s studies of French agriculture (1787-89), were intended as major contributions to knowledge. Marsden’s work was inspired by his regular attendance at the Royal Society’s ‘philosophical ...”

“... the former secretary of state, one of the begetters of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war; William Perry, the former US secretary of defence; James Mattis, Trump’s future first secretary of defence, who thought that Theranos blood tests would be a ‘game changer’ in battlefield medicine. Naturally, all those men would be useful when it came to ...”

“... a doomed love affair. The film is composed almost entirely of still images, a series of black and white photographs accompanied by a narrator’s voiceover. There are other sounds, too – a soft and indecipherable whispering, for example, during the sequence depicting the experiment – which give life to the frozen stills, pulling them into the immediacy of ...”

“... and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster ...”

“... man of letters – poetry editor of the Observer, a contributor to the New Yorker under William Shawn, a TV and radio critic and commentator, a good old-fashioned littérateur. Reflecting on his years spent writing about contemporary poetry, ‘always the shabbiest and most malicious fringe of the literary world’, he admits that during those ten ...”

“... few historical figures introduced to bolster the movie’s plot – the future Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, Archbishop John Hughes and the showman P.T. Barnum – are either transported backwards in time or engage in alliances with gangs that defy the actual marginality of these gangs within the class and power structure of the mid-century city. As ...”

“... metafiction are still strongly influenced by the 1960s: John Barth, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, William Gass. Thanks to the work of this group and the self-named characters of Philip Roth, we might well brace ourselves for archness or emotional coolness (rather than sincerity, warmth and optimistic political engagement) at the first sign of a ...”

“... of the wistfulness and nostalgia that pervaded his previous book, this one was reminiscent of William Faulkner in his demonic vein. Employing several narrators, including ventriloquised historical figures, it told of a criminal gang that set slaves free, only to capture them again for profit. Lowboy, set in present-day New York, describes the disturbing ...”

“... and had been since 1939, when he invented the pocket (as distinct from the strip) cartoon for the William Hickey column in the Daily Express. He drew more than ten thousand of them over the next forty years and his characters, especially Maudie, Countess of Littlehampton, Mrs Frogmarch the Tory lady and Canon Fontwater, played out the range of topical ...”

“... to stand, or rather crouch. Dodson is splendid in appearance as well as oratory, a prophetic white beard underlining his main argument, that Australia should try and emulate Mandela’s South Africa by setting up commissions to work out reconciliation – and, by implication, to revise the historical understanding that has travestied such ...”

“... car parts: as Benchley points out at the novel’s outset, like some grotesque über-car the great white must perpetually keep moving. My sister then held up as evidence The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, in which Marinetti, declaring in 1909 that ‘time and space died yesterday’, describes driving his car so fast that it spins out and overturns. She ...”

“... and renewal in postwar Toronto. Such criticism represented everything that the briskly rationalist William Empson, who detested religiose aesthetics like those of Eliot, found most nauseating. It was enamoured of charts and diagrams, polarities and sub-divisions, with that odd combination of rigorous categories and occult contents which one associates with ...”

“... Carter’s potboiler Beautiful Wasps Having Sex, to studies such as Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot.) Hollywood is captive to its own mythological origins. Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own sees it as the Jewish invention of a ‘shadow America’, an idealised vision of assimilationist immigrants who ...”

“... al-Qaida. ‘We cannot reverse this outcome by more use of military force in Iraq,’ Lt General William Odom, the former head of the National Security Agency, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ‘To try to do so would require siding with Sunni leaders and the Baathist insurgents against pro-Iranian Shia groups. The Baathist insurgents constitute ...”

“... approval when Michelle Obama presented the Best Picture award live from the Diplomatic Room of the White House. In Iran itself, however, the film was less well received. Despite an opening sequence that apologetically acknowledged CIA involvement in an earlier operation – the 1953 coup against the nationalist prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, which many ...”