“... adversary to be manacled, tamed, subjugated, conquered’. The imagery was warlike from the start. James Dunbar, from Scotland, wrote in 1780: ‘Let us learn to wage war with the elements, not with our own kind.’ Frederick II, looking out over drained marshes, announced: ‘Here I have conquered a province with peaceful means.’ It was in 1743 that he ...”

“... hollow and empty as the space between stars’, or Ellroy’s benzedrine-driven hyper-kinetics, or James M. Cain’s rat-a-tat ‘let’s get stinko’ hard-boiled self-consciousness. Flatness is Willeford’s style; metaphor is mistrusted, so is interiority, both the author’s and the characters’. At the end of The Way We Die Now, the last Moseley book and ...”

“... juncture, however, one of Stevens’s earliest contacts in the surety world came to his rescue: James Kearney was now in charge of the bond department of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, an outfit poised to become a rival in literary fame to Kafka’s Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute. ‘Come to Hartford,’ Kearney wrote to ...”

“... in virtue’.According to his nephew, Pico spent the rest of his short life in Florence chastened, meek, intensely spiritual. No more married women. No more public feuds. ‘Until then,’ Gianfrancesco remembered, ‘he longed for glory while false love fuelled his fires and the wiles of women stirred them up.’ Pico threw five books of his love poems into ...”

“... about this undoubtedly American poet. He is the justified sinner whom we meet in the fiction of James Hogg. And he is the superman, the Stavrogin, whom we meet in the fiction of Dostoevsky: the antinomian hero bent both on power and mischief and on the blessedness of the meek, so that he’s Prince Myshkin too, and it’s ...”

“... 382; in 2017 there were 346.)*President Trump says that he should have fired former FBI director James Comey ‘the day I won the primaries’ – apparently forgetting that this was before he held office.*The Trump administration, in its continuing efforts to reduce ‘burdensome federal regulations’, announces it will no longer penalise hospitals if a ...”

“... the right pronoun … [is] crucial as we seek to offer and gain recognition.’ I wrote her a meek email – this was, after all, Judith Butler – pointing out the error. She replied not twenty minutes later: ‘Sorry Amia! I always did have trouble with gender.’ Swoon.I recently told this story to a student for whom I had mistakenly used the wrong ...”

“... twenties he discovered the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, and some time later the novels of Henry James. He liked to read and now began to write for publication – humorous essays and sketches at first, in the manner of Robert Benchley. ‘I dislike night life and clubs,’ he told a friend in a letter. He refused to push to the front of the line at fancy ...”