“... also stayed the longest: a thickset, sandy-faced man with heavy tortoiseshell spectacles, called Allen, who had a strong temper, which was known to erupt in the early hours of the morning after my father had kept him waiting at the wheel outside a hotel, or on holidays abroad, when crossing some high Alpine pass between one Central European spa and ...”

“... management do give us more time to suffer the pains and debilities of old age but, as Woody Allen noted, consider the alternative. Still, Porter is on to something important here and the tension between his two narratives – the Exodus narrative of liberation from ignorance and disease, the other its ironic doppelgänger – suffuses his book. The ...”

“... is likewise visually transfixing. Later, he would become a popular Bay Area psychic, a friend to Allen Ginsberg and the Beats and the experimental filmmaker James Broughton and a prominent gay political activist.) Despite Arthur’s chronic selfishness, Esther appears to have treated him in a generous if not saintly spirit. He ended up extracting quite of ...”

“... of Guatemala City might be let loose on the continent like a plague bacillus, the CIA director, Allen Dulles, campaigned for them to be brought to trial in Guatemala, but cooler counsels prevailed and they were issued with safe-conduct passes to other countries in Latin America. Guevara travelled on to Mexico City.‘Dulles’s instincts,’ as Anderson ...”

“... or their abandonment. In the absence of the ordinary sutures of language, ellipses prevail. For Allen Tate, the most influential critic of the 1930s, Dickinson took this too far: she ‘perceives abstraction and thinks sensation’, he wrote, but her ‘ignorance, her lack of formal intellectual training’ means ‘she cannot reason at all. She can only ...”

“... a soft opportunity for the stoking of misunderstanding in the name of political progress. Lily Allen knew how people were feeling on the ground, she said. ‘So many community centres have been closed down,’ she said, wrongly. Pubs, she added, had been turned into homes for rich people, presumably rich people very different from Lily ...”