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“... fashion for baroque narratological cleverness in fiction, like the films of Charlie Kaufman and Christopher Nolan, the novels of David Mitchell, the television of Steven Moffat and his teams on Sherlock and Doctor Who. There are differences between cleverness and intellect. McCarthy has many things he’s trying to do in his novels, none of which have much ...”

“... this novel without saying Venice, and yet the name is never said. The dust-jacket may give us a Turner water-colour of Venice’s waters, but the blurb says not one word about the novel, and the novel never says the word ‘Venice’. The scene is unmistakable, and is just the setting within which to make the mistake of your life. McEwan has said that ...”

“... Smiley went to an ‘unimpressive school’ and an ‘unimpressive Oxford college’, while Turner, the Yorkshire-accented interrogator in A Small Town in Germany (1968), is ‘a former fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, which takes all kinds of people’. All three men cast disabused eyes over the ruthless spy chiefs, priggish civil servants and ...”

“... Jennifer L. Morgan, Marisa Fuentes, Natasha Lightfoot, Katherine Paugh, Shauna Sweeney and Sasha Turner, to name just six. The study of slavery has in some ways moved beyond Williams’s definition of the problems. Yet the influence of Capitalism and Slavery continues to grow. Citations tripled between 2007 and 2022. The book remains one of very few to offer ...”

“... Fortyish, leather-jacketed, sombre and Northern (‘Lots of planets have a North,’ he says), Christopher Eccleston played the Doctor as a man both hangdog and arrogant, of an age – had he been human – to have been a child when the show was first broadcast, but with a subsequent life that has shown him disappointment, including (a point somewhat ...”

“... charter flight with a granddaughter. He was fond of the arts, and in his last years visited the Turner exhibition at Burlington House eight times, and the Chinese exhibition and the Treasures of Tutankhamun (that unprecedented queue-creating occasion) almost as often. Such was his habitual impatience to get into the National Gallery that he regularly ...”

“... animation. But Olamina dies before the starships actually take off. The first is called the Christopher Columbus, in spite of her objections. ‘This ship is not about a shortcut to riches and empire. It’s not about snatching up slaves and gold and presenting them to some European monarch. But one can’t win every battle. One must know which battles ...”

“... among the books marking the centenary of the Great War are those hewing to the old innocence line. Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 is probably the most well-known. Jasper argues strongly against the revisionist trend: ‘All that we can say for certain is that no one sleepwalked his or her way into this nightmare.’ At ...”

“... Charles Henry Langston, was an abolitionist too; he insisted they name their son after Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt. His younger brother, John Langston, became one of the most prominent advocates for Black rights in the Reconstruction era, and was elected to Congress in 1890. By 1901, however, when Hughes was born, the ...”

“... or the demonstrative. Here David Trotter comes into his own, having learned (I would guess from Christopher Ricks) how such apparently neutral and instrumental parts of speech – including prepositions, ‘in’ and ‘into’, ‘with’ and ‘amid’ and ‘among’ – exert, when used by an accomplished writer, far more powerful suasive force than ...”

“... when the Penguin and Oxford anthologies of English verse edited respectively by Paul Keegan and Christopher Ricks appeared. Like their predecessors, they exclude most of the Middle Ages; feature no work (even in translation) from Latin, Old English or French; and co-opt Irish, Scottish, Welsh and American verse as ‘English’. Since the appearance of ...”

“... at once concerned with the power of theatre and the theatre of power, draws on Geertz and Turner as well as on Harriot and Machiavelli to argue that ‘the Henry plays confirm the Machiavellian hypothesis that princely power originates in force and fraud even as they draw their audience toward an acceptance of that power.’ The Henry plays are ...”

“... at MGM. They wanted him to fashion what he termed a ‘celluloid brassiere’ for Lana Turner, but he insisted on pushing on towards his first major play, provisionally entitled The Gentleman Caller. Having recently completed Gone with the Wind, MGM felt they’d done with Southern women, and thus passed up the chance of the rights to The Glass ...”

“... New England experiences of Whalley and Goffe are not unknown to historians; Christopher Pagliuco’s The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2012) and Matthew Jenkinson’s Charles I’s Killers in America: The Lives and Afterlives of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2019) both feature in Harris’s bibliography. But since ...”

“... and early 1990s was the proving ground of the generation who became the YBAs (Damien Hirst won the Turner Prize in 1995, and Sensation, the show that defined them, opened at the Royal Academy two years later), and McQueen’s sensibility is very close to theirs. ‘There was so much repression in London fashion,’ he once remarked, ‘it had to be livened ...”