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“... America’s crazy, and so sometimes its pure products go sane. Consider the eponymous narrator of Paul Beatty’s novel The Sellout. When we first meet him, in the Supreme Court’s ‘cavernous chambers’, the sellout’s hands are cuffed behind his back. His right to silence ‘long since waived’, he sits in a ‘thickly padded chair that, much like ...”

“... the intellectual. But he is also one of the few working American novelists – along with Paul Beatty, Lydia Millet, Mark Leyner, Mark Doten – truly committed to satire. The opening passage of The Ask compares America to a ‘run-down and demented pimp’ slumped in the corner of a pool hall, a novel image of imperial decline. Sometimes it’s ...”

“... The Wig – a landmark text for writers such as Ishmael Reed, Fran Ross, Colson Whitehead and Paul Beatty – and the two other novels Wright published, both semi-autobiographical, which take a studiously matter-of-fact view of sex, drugs, racism and literary aspiration. Fluctuating between fiction and journalism, full of ‘tricks’ that can’t be ...”

“... films and bomb doors opening, it looks much more like the sort of thing used to brainwash Warren Beatty in The Parallax View. It isn’t fashionable to take these issues seriously. Television is the postmodern medium, and Curtis’s films are perfect intellectual entertainment for an audience knowing enough to get the references, but too knowing to be taken ...”

“... can detect echoes of his jaundiced vision in Jordan Peele’s recent horror film, Get Out, and in Paul Beatty’s novel The Sellout. But, as if it were his destiny to remain just beyond the pale of literary approval, Himes, unlike Baldwin, flunks the contemporary ‘woke’ test. As much as he deplored the prejudices of the black bourgeoisie and aligned ...”

“... round the world with executives from the construction industry, including (several times) Balfour Beatty, the potential privatisers of the London Tube and the company which holds the record for the biggest fine ever imposed under Health and Safety legislation, even before the authorities have fully investigated its crucial role in track maintenance at ...”

“... car manufacturers. He was also the author of a novel, Man in White (1986), about the life of St Paul, with whom he liked to compare himself: ‘Also interesting, for me at least,’ he writes in Cash (1997), ‘were the parallels between Paul and myself. He went out to conquer the world in the name of Jesus Christ; we in ...”

“... dam in Turkey. She was the only speaker in the debate to back the project. The accounts of Balfour Beatty, the British construction firm most closely involved in the dam project, and its parent BICC, had been prepared by Arthur Andersen. When Andersen Consulting wanted a ‘keynote speaker’ for a conference last July on e-business the choice was obvious: the ...”

“... for saying this, apparently endorsed by Chomsky and certainly held by anarchists like Robert Paul Wolff, is that coercion itself – the state’s big shtick – is never justified. The truth is not that power corrupts, but that power’s rationale is corruption, and the best to be hoped for from its use is not that it makes people better, but that it ...”

“... more people are coming to work in the tightly packed central area,’ the then transport secretary Paul Channon wrote in the preface to the Central London Rail Study: ‘This is putting severe strains on London’s transport system.’ The study included a map of Central London’s train routes captioned ‘Extent of Overcrowding in 1987’, a spaghetti mess ...”

“... but, after all, sudden conversions occur. ‘Personally, I would have had the watchers out on St Paul for a long time if I had been in charge of the Christian secret service when he came blundering into Damascus yelling that he’d gone blind, and Christ was the Messiah.’ Railton does his work only too well and on the last page we see one of his younger ...”

“... Army. The case was one of many from this era involving the Army, the most famous of which was Beatty v. Gillbanks (1882). In modern terms, the majority had used its power to curb the religious freedom of an unpopular minority. Was Lord Russell right or wrong to stand by, or should he have allowed his respect for the democratic process to have been (to use ...”

“... since no intellectual journal back then was complete without a Riesman snorkel dive; a piece by Paul de Man (remember him?) which begins on the stirring note, ‘Ever since the war, American criticism has remained relatively stagnant’; and an omnibus review of four books by Northrop Frye. ‘Notes on “Camp”’ transmits on an entirely different ...”

“... impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s Cathedral, Londonderry, of Gráinne, daughter of Northern Ireland’s Education Minister Martin McGuinness (not yet knighted for his varied ...”