“... the right-wing mobs carry weapons and beat people up, that’s a whole different category. A young black man from the bar, overhearing us, stepped up and joined forces with Robert: ‘The leftist mob, they’re bad!’It was a peculiar evening, and I suspect the weirdness of it could be matched anywhere in the US today. Why is it so easy to talk to people like ...”

“... number 326 in the Fortune 500 – lower than Campbell Soup, but higher than both Estée Lauder and Black & Decker – with revenues last year of $7.7 billion and profits of $348 million. Among internet companies, only Google ($16.6 billion) and Amazon ($14.8 billion) have higher turnovers. At the last count, more than fifteen thousand people around the world ...”

“... voice echoing behind us. In addition, my mother had one of her screaming fits and threatened to sue Doris for alienation of affection (hilarity ensued) if she tried to adopt me. So that was quietly dropped. I sometimes said ‘adoptive mother’ anyway, as an easy though inexact solution. It wasn’t only for form’s sake that it mattered how I referred to ...”

“... rivals in the resistance, prompting the brother of a boy who had been killed in the attack to sue Bentivegna.There is another layer of meaning to the via Rasella episode. The attack was timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the birth of fascism: Mussolini’s rally in Milan on 23 March 1919. This was Italian business: even the troops targeted ...”

“... wings – Snowflakes knock spots off Philibert de L’Orme Woodcut adoring kings with narrow eye Black-bottomed whitewear out of nowhere fast You see the azure through the muscatel The white opacities we hear as thunder The fact that each is an iambic pentameter disturbs their individual impact by turning them, in this listing, into a sort of joke stanza ...”

“... this poetry with aspiration and strips it of pretension. Sooner or later, its only recourse is to sue for clemency. Not long after he got back to Paris, Villon was in jail again on a robbery charge. The theology faculty objected to his release, which was made conditional on repayment of his share of the Christmas takings six years earlier. Within a few days ...”

“... someone talking upstairs. I climbed the stairs to the mezzanine and saw a young woman dressed in black leggings, an orange hi-viz jacket a couple of sizes too big and a safety helmet. She was talking to someone on her mobile. She finished the call and told me all the managers who might be able to speak to me were away on business.‘How do you like ...”

“... and the waiting silver carriage. I remember my surprise at Keaton’s gravelly voice and the swank black cigarette holder that seemed out of place in his rumpled forlorn face. There was mischief in their banter. These old vaudevillians were back on the road again, comrades in comic arms, doing what they had done from the beginning of their long peripatetic ...”

“... The current government’s line is the usual one: Labour was so profligate, letting people sue one another left, right and centre, that we have to step in and get things back to sensible levels. But it was Blair’s Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, who capped the legal aid budget, moved to fixed instead of hourly fees and let some areas of law, like ...”

“... won’t wear a particular European-designed shoe because it is too much like the slippers ‘black women bought in the market to wear in the house’. This narrator uses references far beyond the Caribbean city of the novel, describing ‘the way Arabs cry for their dead’ and ‘the pubic hair of a Japanese’. At the same time, one feels an intimacy ...”

“... which is capable of undermining the very basis of civilised society.’ Fela later tried to sue the Government through the civil courts, but the case was thrown out on the grounds that ‘government can do no wrong’ – the enduring principle of military rule. Fela understood earlier than most that once the Army had sunk their claws into the body ...”

“... signs on to become a cleaning lady at her favourite church, gets her flat exorcised, believes a black beetle is the incarnation of Our Lady, and becomes convinced that the Indian mystic Meher Baba is ‘telling’ her to do things: like give up smoking for a day, or demonstrate her obedience to him by eating a turd from the cat’s litter tray in the ...”

“... canvases larger; some of his sitters grew larger too, culminating in the enormous Leigh Bowery and Sue Tilley the benefits supervisor (perhaps the most famous fat woman since Two-Ton Tessie O’Shea). Freud liked to emphasise his own incorrigibility, his instinct to do the opposite of what he was told to do; and several times in interviews he ascribed this ...”

“... which the Rhenish Jews brought with them when they migrated to Poland after the ravages of the Black Death of 1348. (‘I would like to tell you, ladies and gentlemen,’ Franz Kafka told a German-speaking audience in Prague before a recital of visiting Yiddish poets, ‘how much more of the jargon you will understand than you think.’) This kinship was ...”

“... are insisting on holding services despite lockdown orders, is invoking a law authorising him to sue to eliminate any ‘pattern or practice’ of unconstitutional conduct – in this case, against ‘freedom of religion’. The law, which the president had previously attempted to repeal, was passed in the Clinton years following the notorious beating of ...”