“... owned a van’. The couple married in 1937 when Beth fell pregnant; the child, a boy called Robert, died. Two years later, they had Cora and after the war, opened a newsagent-tobacconist-cornershop called the Cabinette. Twenty years later, Janice is a toddler and Eddie is increasingly flailing, violent, drunk. Shortly before Beth and Janice leave for ...”

“... novels began to be rediscovered in the 1970s. While researching his screenplay for Chinatown, Robert Towne came across Ask the Dust and took up Fante’s cause. He optioned the novel and persuaded Francis Ford Coppola to do the same for the book Fante was then working on, The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977). In 1978, the poet Charles Bukowski mentioned ...”

“... which survives Romantic misery (the Werther-like ‘Sorrows of Teufelsdröckh’), the collapse of self-sufficiency and romantic love and dogmatic certainties. The bewildering experience of almost drowning in Teufelsdröckh’s self-consciousness, reading one’s way past confusion, uncertainty and Byronic despair to ...”

“... persons of Caesar and narrator coincided. At any rate, the experience instilled in my childhood self a (not articulated) sense, residual still, that there might be a mystical, if misty, relationship between reading and power. Francis Spufford, a third of the way into The Child that Books Built, tells the following story: I learnt to read around my sixth ...”

“... From here Donne inched his way towards preferment. He became an MP, and found favour with Sir Robert Drury, who took him to France and the Low Countries in 1611-12. Absence always worked powerfully on Donne’s imagination, and according to Izaak Walton, his friend and first biographer, he had a vision while on this trip: ‘I have seen my dear wife pass ...”

“... or was he, as Arthur Danto puts it, ‘overproductive, repetitive and shallow’? Naive, or a self-consciously calculating opportunist? The canny ‘manager of his own fairyland’ (Jean Cassou), or a painter who carefully cultivated his image as a ‘loveable, fantastical Jewish genius from Vitebsk’ (Clement Greenberg)? Crypto Christian or too ...”

“... are two Kincaids: Elaine Potter Richardson, the daughter of the domineering Annie Drew, and the self-fashioning writer, Jamaica Kincaid. In Kincaid’s fictional world, to be someone’s daughter is to carry a great burden. To become yourself, you must reject, kill, refuse the mother, leave home, write books and essays against her, marry a white man, build ...”

“... edition of this book. Nor, in some sense, can it even be attempted. The Lyons translation, as Robert Irwin explains in his introduction, returns to the Arabic version that Burton used, restores the interjected outbursts of song and bawdy that Galland skipped, and sternly avoids the free and easy habits of some of his successors. It clearly aims to ...”

“... spears at the British. Individual British deaths were taken very seriously. After Lieutenant Robert Grenfell was hacked to death during the cavalry charge at Omdurman, his brother’s angry account of it spurred the men inspecting the wasted battlefield to ‘polish off the wounded and dangerous Dervishes with their bayonets in a very determined ...”

“... and correspondence with his publisher, François Maspero. As the editors, Jean Khalfa and Robert Young, note, this body of writing – unfinished, restless, often agonised – reflects Fanon’s search for ‘freedom as dis-alienation’, itself a response to his experience of what Sartre called ‘extreme situations’: the battlefields of the Second ...”

“... in Lebanon. The argument given in defence of what was done has been, from the start, that sending Robert McFarlane to Teheran was an attempt to exploit a ‘geopolitical opening’. Both versions of the same series of events have been criticised as an affront to the stated US policy of not dealing with terrorists or terrorist states. According to the ...”

“... as a result of the volume of sabre-rattling or the onset of war with Iran; a decision to sack Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating meddling in the 2016 election; a shutdown of the federal government to extort funds for the wall with Mexico; a sudden intensification of the president’s attacks on his political enemies and accusers in ...”

“... of how much progress has been made in machine learning, the process by which computer algorithms self-improve at tasks involving analysis and prediction. The techniques involved are primarily statistical: through trial and error the machine learns which answer has the highest probability of being correct. That sounds rough and ready, but because, as per ...”

“... was just and necessary. The group that carried out the Magoo’s Bar bombing in Durban was led by Robert McBride, a senior commander in uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress. After the end of the apartheid regime, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission stated that attacks like this one were ‘gross ...”

“... for their continued authority of speech we must come closer to our own time – to the poetry of Robert Lowell or of Sylvia Plath. There the language of poetry has the same kind of mesmeric power and the same air of constant danger. But it is, of course, danger of a different kind – the danger that boils up from within and makes living for a poet a hazard ...”