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“... the actual existence of Americans and the fantasies they inhabit. ‘Instead of saying, It’s Chase Manhattan that created Wisconsin Steel’s closing, it’s not you,’ explains the director of a neighbourhood association, ‘we live in the world of Dallas, of daytime soaps, in a world of fantasy. So we don’t have to deal with the real world.’ A ...”

“... have to be corrected. This is good paranoid stuff, and it’s enjoyable to watch Owen and Watts chase the bad guys from city to city, from Milan to New York to Istanbul. They get their men in the end, or rather Owen does, having chivalrously kept Watts out of the ugly stuff, but another evil bank will have its day tomorrow, at least in this kind of ...”

“... Bushnell, Sex and the City’s creator and its second lead writer were gay men, Darren Star and Michael Patrick King, prompting one of the Girls cast, Jemima Kirke, to say of Dunham’s series: ‘It’s not Sex and the City … That’s four gay men sitting around talking.’ Meanwhile Issa Rae, the Black creator of HBO’s Insecure (2016-21), defended ...”

“... The old Bond theme tune surfaces and rapidly vanishes whenever the action – the motor- bike chase across the rooftops of Istanbul, the slug-out on top of the moving train – gets a little too hokey. It’s not less exciting because it’s hokey – on the contrary – and it reminds us that in the previous two Bond films, as in several thousand other ...”

“... fate. But we remained ignorant of the escape, the threat to kill himself, the television highway chase, the eventual surrender and arrest, until one of my hosts, venturing out for some groceries, returned with the news. He had heard it on the car radio and then bought the paper to find out more.‘O.J. must be the most famous person ever arrested for ...”

“... he has a good ear for the anxieties of settled, middle-class life. Price becomes a member of Fox Chase, a swanky club that is concealed from public view: ‘the hidden gem of the golfing world, a club where men waited ten years for the chance to mortgage their homes to pay the initiation fee, and did it with a smile’. He soon feels out of ...”

“... there’s the famous story of the Essex, sunk to the west of the Galapagos Islands in 1820. Owen Chase, its Chief Mate, published a Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship ‘Essex’, of Nantucket in 1821. Melville, who footnotes four quotations from Chase in Chapter 45, was less ...”

“... In a gloss on the snot riddle in his book Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, Michael Thompson explains that the riddle succeeds by playing upon that which is residual to our system of cultural categories. When, in the context of wealth and poverty, we talk of possessable objects we unquestioningly assume that we are talking about ...”

“... This is a miniature dictionary of the invented English in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon’s charming, flawed and exhausting new novel: bik (Yiddish: bull) – doorman latke (Yiddish: potato cake) – 1. police cap 2. policeman noz (Yiddish: nose) – policeman shammes (Yiddish: assistant to rabbi, beadle) – policeman sholem (Yiddish: peace) – gun shoyfer (Yiddish: horn) – cell phone shtarker (Yiddish: strong man, strong arm) – gangster; hard man Yiddish, it turns out, has not said its last word: it is still involved in the business of coinages and slippages ...”

“... the year goes by. The reader’s pleasures are other and various. One of them is the intertextual chase. Here, for instance, Stead simultaneously parodies Robbe-Grillet’s degree-zero text and, by putting back the person, turns it to his own discursive and expository ends: ‘And now the shadow cast by the cabbage tree at the centre of the white courtyard ...”

“... and frictionlessly as possible, trying to keep his wife, stay on top of his zealous underlings, chase after the impressive and intimidating manliness that was never at any time his. He is a somewhat memorable if not entirely plausible or successful creation, and his sections of the novel resemble an Auschwitz episode of Dad’s Army. And then, last and ...”

“... preference – the demands of the form prevail, and person is inevitably upstaged by plot. Michael Dibdin’s Vendetta marks the reappearance of Aurelio Zen, the Venetian cop who cleared up an unsavoury kidnapping in Ratking (Gold Dagger Award, 1988), where the unsparing exposé of depravity among the powerful of Perugia was matched by a command of ...”

“... a tremendous blow-out, complete with wines and cigars, at the White Lion in Cerrigydrudion. But Michael Sampson, Anthony’s father, who had scattered the ashes nine times over the mountain, looks cold and ill at ease in the faded press photographs. And the Rai’s widow was not present. Soon afterwards an Aunt Mary, never met before, came to visit the ...”

“... with the brutal sacking of Director-General Alasdair Milne and continuing with the appointment of Michael Checkland as his successor and the recruitment of John Birt as Deputy D-G with a remit to sort out the news and current affairs operation. Checkland, an accountant, set about pruning the BBC while Birt embarked on a root-and-branch reform of the news and ...”

“... as well as three of her four novels – the last of which, the posthumously published Horace Chase (1894), begins: ‘In a mountain village of North Carolina, in the year 1873, the spring had opened with its accustomed beauty.’ By the time of her last novel, Woolson had long put America behind her. ‘I always liked the idea of going away from home for ...”