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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the effect Sontag still has on me 15 years after her death, and nothing less will do. Born Sue Rosenblatt, a rabbity name that would never do on a marquee, she chose to be known as Susan Sontag (taking the surname of her stepfather, her biological father having died when she was five). ‘To write, I must love my name,’ Sontag declared, and hers ...”

“... thought London was this idealised place of jellied eels and pearly kings and queens and then these black people and other minorities came in and spoiled things so they came to places like Broadstairs and Margate. Thanet was seen as a sort of white enclave where they could be happy again. Lots of these people are still here and will be voting in their droves ...”

“... and despite the solemn treatment of his terrors and coming of age, there’s more than a touch of black farce in the novel’s stage management, especially during the final catastrophe. Above all, the translated Yiddish dialogue is splendid: ‘almost too splendid’, according to Alfred Kazin, who wrote the introduction to a 1991 edition of the novel, since ...”

“... the people who place the ads are personal injury lawyers looking for clients who want to sue whoever it was they think gave them this particular cancer). Many of the words cost only a few cents to bid for: 30c for ‘pet food’, for instance. If you click on one of the links, the advertiser pays Google the agreed amount. Google’s ads are so ...”