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“... why Israel had to call up its reserve forces when Egypt mobilised its army in the Sinai peninsula, miles from the border? Segev notes that Israel had seen no need to respond to similar manoeuvres a few months earlier. Was Nasser’s rhetoric the new element that precipitated war? Perhaps. Were Israel’s warnings to Syria, especially Rabin’s warning, some ...”

“... his biographers in dismissing them in a page or two as ‘somewhat crackbrained’, to quote Richard Shannon. Shannon’s two-volume life offers a fuller account of Gladstone’s intellectual development than other modern biographies, yet even he allots as much space to Macaulay’s mesmerisingly destructive review of The State in Its Relations with the ...”

“... and brothers’. Most were written by established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff selected, engage with the ...”

“... on the first page of The Maltese Falcon, and the descriptions keep coming. Even Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, who appears on page four and is dead by page eight, can’t be skipped. ‘He was of medium height, solidly built, wide in the shoulders, thick in the neck, with a jovial heavy-jawed red face and some grey in his close-trimmed hair.’ You would ...”

“... populate Pentagon and State Department committees, including the Defense Policy Board, run by Richard Perle (who was appointed by Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz), where Israeli security is equated with US security. According to Jason Vest in the Nation, JINSA spends the ‘bulk of its budget taking a bevy of retired US generals and admirals ...”

“... psalmodic line (and of much archaic poetry) has been plain in English since the translations of Miles Coverdale in 1535. Coverdale marked the division into hemistiches (or what Alter, following Benjamin Hrushovski, calls ‘versets’) with a colon, a practice followed, inconsistently, by the King James. Bishop Robert Lowth explained it in detail in 1753 in ...”

“... efforts to reinvent a British tradition of patriotic, elite paternalism were heavily influenced by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book The Spirit Level, with its strange subtitle, ‘Why Equality Is Better for Everyone’. Its underlying assumption was that inequality could only be tackled by an appeal to the rationality and self-interest of those ...”

“... In April​ 2022, Justin Trudeau watched Richard Baker, the 39th governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, hand over ownership of its ornate department store in Winnipeg to the local First Nations. The ceremonial was Hanoverian, with Baker and Grand Chief Jerry Daniels trading pelts and a gold coin, but the rhetoric was that of postcolonial reconciliation ...”

“... caricatured by some on the British left, who sometimes treat it as if it were six hundred square miles of South Kensington. He is in no doubt that London’s agglomeration of wealth, power and status is damaging to the rest of the country, but makes clear that this is just as damaging to Londoners. The ‘concentration of all English politics in London has ...”

“... move, part of a Saudi-UAE effort to counter what they present as Iranian influence. As Richard Sokolsky and Aaron David Miller put it in an article for Politico, The crown prince engineered this dispute not to punish Qatar for its financing of terrorism (a hypocritical comment coming from the Saudis, whose own citizens have provided funding to ...”

“... the kingdome of our own language,’ and if English writers from the 1580s onwards can be seen, as Richard Helgerson argued in Forms of Nationhood (1992), to be engaged in a struggle to reinvent a barbarous provincial tongue as an instrument of cultural authority, then Shakespeare’s dramaturgy was of a piece with such designs: for him the Greek and Roman ...”

“... to have felt that voting might be a special case that needed further consideration. However, as Richard Tuck points out in his fascinating new book about the strange hold that the free rider problem has had on political science ever since Olson, such misgivings have not stopped many of his followers from treating voting as the paradigmatic case of the ...”

“... and the London Waste Ltd plant in particular, was investigated by the television journalist Richard Watson for Newsnight. A predictable story of fudging, economy with the truth, buck-passing and ministerial denial. Until August 2000, London Waste was guilty of mixing relatively safe bottom ash with the contaminated fly ash that the process was ...”

“... have tended to feel either hagiographic or hostile. The famous early masterpiece of debunking was Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version, published in 1968 and a product of that anti-establishment end-of-decade. Loveable Uncle Walt had been dead for less than two years. Schickel’s work is still superbly readable and shrewd even when it is deeply unfair; it ...”

“... suddenly he would break into a big smile. He was gracious, but he said what he thought.’ Like Richard Yates, a near contemporary and friend who was also famous on the writing-school circuit for not being famous, Williams served in the war and had a few unsuccessful marriages, drank too much, promoted a writerly ideal of Flaubert-like strenuousness, and ...”