“... 1932 and raised in Pennsylvania, a child of the Depression, Updike reached prominence during the Kennedy era as American literature’s princely elf, his Jiminy Cricket nose peering down with amusement, his tall, gangly frame having the lanky assurance of someone preparing to sink a basket from the free throw line. (The scrape of sneakers on the basketball ...”

“... was the acknowledged inspiration for J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’. The psychosexual derangement of Ballard’s Crash would have dissolved into low comedy if the humble Raleigh had replaced the Ford Cortina as the vehicle of choice for navigating the edgelands of suburban ...”

“... after Trump had claimed that Cruz’s father was directly involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and repeatedly commented that Cruz’s wife was much uglier than Melania, even posting comparative photos of the two. Now Cruz, in an unexpectedly tight race, has implored Trump to come to Texas to campaign for him.)*The White House leaks to reporters ...”

“... as she herself was ill and died soon afterwards.) Since two of Austen’s brothers, Frank and Charles, went to sea and were away from home for long periods of time, it is easy to see the tender and constant feelings which Fanny Price in Mansfield Park has for her brother William, also away at sea, as being a fundamental part of Austen’s emotional ...”

“... among ordoliberal dogmatists in Europe, such as Wilhelm Röpke, who accused the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations of endangering the racial unity of the West by pursuing socialistic ideas of equality. In Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Quinn Slobodian tracks the circulation of Röpke’s ideas among right-wing Americans ...”

“... country’ as opposed to ‘The World’; ‘VC’, ‘Charlie’, or even, respectfully, ‘Sir Charles’, as stubbornly opposed to ‘friendlies’, subdivided into US, ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) and ‘Free World’ – South Koreans, Thais, Filipinos, Australians, New Zealanders and, keeping low profiles somewhere, 30 each from Chiang ...”

“... DC. Another player made up an occasional fourth man. Isaiah Berlin was happy, at least when Charles (Chip) Bohlen was unavailable, to furnish an urbane ditto to their ruthlessness. Almost as if to show that academics and intellectuals may be tough guys, too – the most lethal temptation to which the contemplative can fall victim – Berlin’s ...”

“... with power divided between controllers, strand editors and regional department heads. Troy Kennedy Martin’s 1985 anti-nuclear six-parter Edge of Darkness was commissioned by the head of serials, Jonathan Powell, produced by the Birmingham regional drama head, Michael Wearing, and scheduled before Martin had finished the scripts. Third, as a result of ...”

“... time and ought to have grown out of such silliness, another notable casualty of which was Jackie Kennedy, with whom Adlai Stevenson asked the cast of Beyond the Fringe to supper in New York in 1963. They went and I didn’t. Never spelling it out to myself, I clung far too long to the notion that shyness was a virtue and not, as I came too late to see, a ...”

“... he ghosted his autobiography? To what extent did Ted Sorensen create the verbal manner of John F. Kennedy when he wrote Profiles in Courage, a book for which the future president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in the ...”

“... that had created the European Economic Community (EEC) was plain and, strongly encouraged by the Kennedy administration in Washington, which saw Britain as a useful bridgehead into the Community, Macmillan applied for membership in 1962. Explaining that Britain would be little better than a Trojan horse for American domination of Europe, de Gaulle vetoed the ...”

“... Paris, intended for use in assassinating Castro, on the very day in November 1963 that President Kennedy was shot. The Cubans were understandably careful with unannounced visitors bearing gifts. At the end of my trip, I was able to present Carlos Rafael with the rather sweaty Stilton, before we went on to discuss Cuba’s ‘second’ agrarian reform – the ...”

“... at his own luck.‘In​ a neighbourhood thickly studded with elegant villas and mansions,’ Charles Dickens’s sub-editor W.H. Wills wrote in Household Words in 1850, ‘Bayswater and Notting Hill, in the parish of Kensington, is a plague-spot, scarcely equalled for its insalubrity by any other in London.’ A workhouse stood near the site where ...”