“... underwear brand to promote a new bra (an odd choice) and decided to make a pun on tangying, which means ‘an effortless win’ but also carries the implication, via tang, of lying down. ‘Wear the bra and lie down to win with no effort?’ Female netizens took offence and the topic went to number one on Weibo. Lawyers reminded Li that according to Chinese ...”

“... also wrote the dissent, which is unsigned), and again in a recent abortion case.Ginsburg’s death means that the political centre of the court will now probably settle on Justice Gorsuch. He is a more interesting jurist than liberals at first admitted. He recently wrote the decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, in which the court held that employees are ...”

“... gentle stroking’ in the dark, with a slow, shared coming down. Men’s infidelity in marriage means little, for they are naturally promiscuous, whereas an unfaithful wife is a wife ready to break off her marriage. The ‘Coolidge Effect’ is the experts’ term for this contrast in sexual attitudes. On a Presidential visit to a farm, Mrs Coolidge asked ...”

“... any Scots from the indictment (though – unkindest cut – he does exonerate one Welshman, David Jones). Worse still for Crawford, Kenner announces, ‘There’s no longer an English literature’: by which he means that, whereas ‘talent has not been lacking’ – on the contrary, ‘good poets are dispersed round ...”

“... founding father, on this side of the Atlantic, of strategic studies: the academic analysis of the means and ends of military force in a nuclear age. This was a field which had been pioneered in the United States by academics who sought to apply mechanistic theories to nuclear war. Howard, by contrast, believed in the empirical study of the problems, enriched ...”

“... but have won the respect of professional critics, who are favoured: V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, David Storey, Paul Scott, Iris Murdoch, for instance. Beyond that it isn’t easy to see much significance in the list – perhaps there’s a nostalgia for the old Empire (Scott, J.G. Farrell, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, plus Nadine Gordimer, Naipaul, and P.H. Newby ...”

“... for burlesque, rather than for the tragic or pastoral mode of the works by Ingres and Manet and David which he takes as his sources. A visit to the Hôtel Salé in the Marais where the Musée Picasso opened a year ago is as exhilarating and depressing as a trip to the Royal Academy exhibition. Here, too, there are masterpieces from the artist’s own ...”

“... accompanied by the devoted Ruth, who is a Moabite and will become the progenitrix of the line of David. This is striking because elsewhere in the Bible all intercourse with Moab is prohibited. Havrelock shrewdly notes that Ruth and Naomi are a reversal of Lot’s daughters, who incestuously engendered the Moabites and their neighbours the Ammonites. Of all ...”

“... in Swarming and the Future of Conflict (2000) by the RAND Corporation’s John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt. Technology, Arquilla and Ronfeldt argue, will soon make it possible for small clusters of loosely organised military units to conduct brief and co-ordinated strikes, then disperse. Message boards, similarly, allow lone hackers to share targets and ...”

“... and American aspiration. The twist comes in the form of a man disguised as a meter reader who means to abscond with Alison and make her his wife, unless ‘fuckwise it went bad’, in which case he intends to kill her, ditch her corpse, ‘then lay low, watch the papers like he’d done with the non-arousing redhead’. Kyle, who lives in a strict ...”

“... to her career tell us much more about ourselves than they do about her. We did not hear from David Cameron that she eventually became an embarrassment to the Conservative Party. Before the great banking bust of 2008, which owed much to her policies, he had ditched her and her legacy. No one pointed out either that, despite her well-known convictions and ...”

“... and folk tales are clumsy and blundering and foolish, and their strength doesn’t always prevail: David fells Goliath with a slingshot (like a child in a bombsite playground), and poor boy Jack can outwit the ogre at the top of the beanstalk, however big and strong and vicious and rich he is, and make off with the golden goose. Such stories are popular ...”

“... solution, preferring the narrow Israeli interpretation of the Oslo Accords and, later, the Camp David summit and the Geneva programme. This means consenting to a Palestinian state in control of the Gaza Strip and those parts of the West Bank where Jews are not densely settled (thereby allowing Israel to annex Greater ...”

“... of which three-quarters are people, from Aalto to Zuckermann, taking in Fidel Castro, Elizabeth David, Erskine Childers, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Robert Byron, Lawrence Durrell, Le Corbusier, Malcolm MacDonald, Tambimuttu ... and Donald Maclean. It is completely typical of the whole book that Maclean (whom he knew at school at Gresham’s) is characterised ...”

“... Geoffrey Leech, Jennifer Coates, F.R. Palmer, R.A. Close, John Sinclair, Jan Firbas, Nils Enkvist, David Crystal, Jan Svartvik, Wolf-Dietrich Bald, Nelson Francis, Morton Bloomfield, E.L. Epstein, John Lyons, Archibald Hill, James Sledd, R.I. McDavid Jr, R.K. O’Cain, Linda Barnes, Josef Vachck and Barbara Strang. So varied as well as distinguished a ...”