“... present. ‘Unbelievably,’ he says of the Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell’s killing of John D’Esterre (in a duel that set Catholic against Protestant), ‘O’Connell faced no legal proceedings at all over this act, while his standing among his followers was enhanced.’Rather than spoiling his book, this authorial stance galvanises readers to ...”

“... claim that Desperate Characters is ‘obviously superior to any novel by Fox’s contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow’. My own reservations lie not with the superlatives, but with the implicit grounds for comparison. If Fox is, in Franzen’s phrase, ‘inarguably great’ – and I believe she is – it isn’t because, for ...”

“... Eastman was living in New York with Crystal, and through a friend of hers became an assistant to John Dewey at Columbia. Dewey was one of the leading philosophers in America, and his prestige beyond university philosophy departments was such that, as Eastman recalled, ‘rays of his influence may have helped to mould me long before I heard of him.’ The ...”

“... decline, but eating bananas had been the major cause of death. A lawyer called Albert T. Patrick took charge of the funeral arrangements. On the day after Rice’s death, Patrick tried to have four cheques certified. The cheques, all made out to himself, totalled $250,000, and appeared to have been signed by Rice on the day before he died. When James ...”

“... Holy Land was at its most holy in your own heart. This might be a demanding belief for those who took it seriously, but religious certainty could also make it a comfort. Sometimes the reassurance came a little too easily. Even when such faith was common, the inward annexation of the Holy Land made sophisticated religious thinkers suspicious. In Apocalypse ...”

“... and on 2 May the blockade began in earnest. Hemon, in Chicago, applied for political asylum and took any job he could find – assembling sandwiches, selling magazine subscriptions door to door – while getting to work on his English; later he enrolled on a master’s course at Northwestern University. By the time he was able to revisit Sarajevo, in ...”

“... the far end of a corridor of brilliant commentary. There are many entries here for the writers who took up with him – Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Sartre and Beauvoir, Jean Genet and others – though none under B for Beckett, and none for John Berger, who was cool at first, then much warmer, coming under fire from ...”

“... found a patron in Fred Holland Day, a wealthy Bostonian aesthete and photographer, who not only took photographs of Gibran (a big-eyed, soulful-looking boy), but also introduced him to the writings of Maeterlinck and Whitman.Eventually, Day became an eccentric recluse, but by then Gibran had found other patrons. He was to spend a large part of his life ...”

“... all of which passed by in the opposite direction. Then one ship came in our direction, halted and took us on board. That ship was the Saddam Hussein. Was the first thing we should have done to question the captain about his human rights credentials?’ Were you a Palestinian, would you thank Mr Bush? If you were an Indian or Pakistani contract worker, or a ...”

“... pleased. The situation was accepted by circle on circle of distinguished friends, and when Arthur took a second mistress, a warm-hearted and perhaps rather tactless young journalist from New Zealand, it seemed best, as far as possible, to ignore her. Alison Grant Robertson had none of the qualifications (knowing the Stracheys, knowing the Farjeons, knowing ...”

“... an expression of what Woolf described in her diary as ‘the frock consciousness’ of life. She took considerable care about her own appearance but like most of the writers Terry Newman discusses in Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore (HarperCollins, £20), she was not interested in fashion per se. Her friend Madge Garland, who edited Vogue and ...”

“... that fills the whole universe and the human soul’. By the 1950s, he had come to the attention of John Bennett, a British fossil fuel researcher and follower of the mystic George Gurdjieff. Bennett invited Subuh to Britain in 1957, and he returned to Jakarta with a coterie of new European and Australian disciples. In 1966 the movement set up a very ...”

“... of the city’s unfathomable complexity. At the time I was reading The Delirious Museum I took a Saturday walk in Paris from the Musée Carnavalet, which stands in the narrow streets of the Marais, to the Musée d’Orsay, grand enough in itself and made grander by its position, across the river from the Tuileries and the Louvre. Paris is generous to ...”

“... gave IAEA inspectors access to all its remaining nuclear sites. But when the Bush administration took over in January 2001, it refused to confirm that it was bound by the ‘no hostile intent’ statement; then it announced that North Korea was part of the ‘axis of evil’; then it abandoned the fuel oil shipments and the reactor project. North Korea ...”

“... and sought to bring a private suit for criminal libel, appeared to have it on the ropes; how John Wells felt that his jokes were ‘ostentatiously removed, spat on and ground into the carpet’ after brainstorming sessions with the others; how, as time went on, Ingrams loved to wind up his colleagues in the office, push his chair back and look on at the ...”