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“... William Strunk was a standard-bearer for the use of bold, brief English. In The Elements of Style, first published in 1918, the Cornell professor set out his rules of usage and principles of composition in the form of direct commands – ‘Sergeant Strunk snapping orders to his platoon’. ‘Omit needless words ...”

“... the top Mafia people, Richard Nixon, Si Newhouse, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, William F. Buckley, an endless list of Congressmen and judges and society swells, of the rich and famous. Cohn knew, dealt with, worked for, went to parties with and generally hobnobbed with more celebrities than any other American. He did favours for them ...”

“... salt and pepper as you please.’ In a 1936 review, Clifford Fadiman recommended that the prose of William Faulkner be taken with just such a hefty pinch of salt. Fatigued by ‘the Non-Stop or Life Sentence’ which he considered to be the ruin of Absalom, Absalom!, he declared that ‘all of Mr Faulkner’s shuddering invective pales in horrendousness before ...”

“... CVs (typically quite selective) onto the narrative in a clumsy appendix. The contrast with William Taubman’s biography of Khrushchev – to take an obvious parallel – is painful.1 Taubman started out much more explicitly than Vogel with the intention of studying his subject from the angle of his relations with the US, but became so imaginatively ...”

“... and inventors. Nonetheless, it was a Scottish (or at least Anglo-Scottish) educationalist, Sir William Spens, who in his 1938 report on the future of secondary education proposed that children should be given a place at grammar school if ‘family circumstance and tradition’ meant they were likely to work ‘with tongue and pen’ – in other words, not ...”

“... advertisement hoardings and the Great Exhibition. Its gaudy vulgarity appalled such aesthetes as William Morris and, retrospectively, Nikolaus Pevsner, who wrote of Victorian manufacture’s ‘rank growth’. Dickens was true neither to life nor to his age. He was a cartoonist rather than a documentarist – not that the veracity of documentarists is to be ...”

“... defined his political ideal in ‘a celebrated study of the Utopian Socialists from Robert Owen to William Morris’. Marquis is also, it emerges, a dirty-minded lecher who betrays his disciple Richard sexually and intellectually before being carried off raving to the lunatic asylum. He returns at the end of the novel to lead the fight against Cruise ...”

“... the war, he remained a minor figure. During this long opening section, the Confederate guerrillas William Quantrill, Bloody Bill Anderson and even Archie Clement, James’s companion during the Civil War, overshadow him. Still, the account is often smart and engaging. In the 1850s and 1860s, western Missouri and eastern ...”

“... wave after wave of neo-Marxist theory. As major influences, Sartre, Williams, Lukacs, Goldmann, Anderson, Althusser, Macherey, Benjamin, Derrida and the feminist movement have followed one another in quick succession. The Function of Criticism, hard on the heels of The Rape of Clarissa and Literary Theory: An Introduction, marks if anything an ...”

“... In​ 1882, the year Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams were born, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter, a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. It wasn’t as good as a Remington but it was cheaper. Nietzsche was losing his eyesight, probably as a result of syphilis, and hoped the Writing Ball would help. But first he had to master touch-typing ...”

“... and false imprisonment. The government’s attempt to challenge an award of £300 to the printer William Huckle gave the Court of Common Pleas an opportunity to point out that treating him ‘very civilly’, with ‘beefsteaks and beer’, had not diminished the gravity of the state’s ‘exercising arbitrary power, violating Magna Carta, and attempting to ...”

“... a rejection of the fusionism developed at the National Review in the 1950s under the editorship of William Buckley, which ultimately saw Reagan – and Thatcher – take power by combining neoliberal capitalism with social conservatism. The ten National Conservative principles stipulate that ‘the free market cannot be absolute’ and that the Bible ‘should ...”

“... two shipments, the remaining foreign hostages would be turned over, along with the remains of William Buckley [the murdered CIA station chief in Beirut]. On 11 February ... Ayatollah Khomeini would step down. Just like that. And just so far does the mind of a Marine lieutenant-colonel go in the White House when he is under no serious political ...”

“... it happens, this volume – the first of a projected trio – has already been proclaimed by Perry Anderson, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, to be ‘not lesser than Economy and Society itself in analytic stature’ – an absurd hyperbole which can do no good to either the author or his subject, and is in any case belied by ...”

“... Jacques Derrida deeply disliked the notion, suspecting it of dark metaphysical tendencies. For William Blake, from whom Martin Jay takes the title of his absorbing new study, experience is a domain of false consciousness and fruitless desire. For Romantics like Keats, by contrast, it is the zone of sensuous immediacy in which truth is revealed. Truth, for ...”