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“... degenerated from the high point of the 1980s – when, as one former officer tells the journalist Tom Harper in Broken Yard, his book about the Met, ‘people had caravans and boats named after the home secretary’ – into barely concealed mutual contempt in the 2010s. ‘You will not find a police officer now … who would be willing to vote ...”

“... a lesbian love-affair, and was written shortly after Strangers on a Train, which was branded by Harper as ‘A Harper Novel of Suspense’. Anxious not to be relabelled as ‘a lesbian-book writer’, Highsmith submitted the manuscript under a pseudonym: Harper turned it down. She ...”

“... popularity. In simpler times, this story of a tragic killing in a small town would have brought Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird to mind. Now, the novel’s appeal may have more to do with our conflicting feelings about the trial and how it should have been conducted. In Guterson there are no lecherous journalists chasing exclusives or high-powered ...”

“... in his macabre actuarial pursuits, as well as in his legal battles, by a white lawyer called Tom Radney. Exploiting the vulnerabilities of an insurance industry that in its eagerness to sell policies had neglected basic fraud prevention, Radney leveraged his client’s luck with dead bodies and live juries to lucrative effect. He made enough money to ...”

“... to a report published in 2020 by the Foreign Policy Centre. In his recent polemic, Lawfare (Harper, £10.99), the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson identifies three reasons why autocrats, kleptocrats and multinationals are so fond of London’s libel courts. First, English media law is claimant friendly. Second, British courts – much like British ...”

“... work, he had difficulty finding a publisher. The book was eventually taken by the New York firm Harper, after the commissioning editor consulted his wife on the matter (it would be interesting to know if she ever met Dolly Grey). Riders of the Purple Sage has one of the best, and most imitated, openings in Western fiction. The narrative is set in 1871-2 ...”

“... favourite restaurant, La Niçoise, in upper Georgetown, where he had a regular booking. He drank a Harper bourbon to start, two or three double martinis before the meal, and then bourbon with it. Back in his office, which had no natural light, he often napped much of the afternoon. Then he took home his files and worked and drank through the night. Although ...”

“... Revolution and, in different ways and at different times, changed their minds. George McLean Harper’s William Wordsworth: His Life, Works and Influence (1919) set a coping-stone on the scholarship of that period. In subsequent decades, despite much patient editorial scholarship, the matter of the poets’ ‘revolutionary’ youth has been obscured and ...”

“... talent like his – gilt-edged, romantic, dark and stylishly frail – was a fashion magazine like Harper’s Bazaar. This was a world away from Harold Ross’s manly fine-tuning: a place, rather, for womanly fine-tuning, and for subtle new writing by people such as Jean Stafford and Eudora Welty; and beyond that it was one of the robust new advertising ...”