“... has been borne by precisely those groups that supported Obama most: blacks, Hispanics and the young. (In 2008, the 18-29 age group, which usually accounts for about 11 per cent of the electorate, contributed 18 per cent of the total vote, splitting 66 to 32 in Obama’s favour.) These groups are now the most disillusioned and apathetic, and feel ...”

“... gigantic flying bear, ‘the de facto ruler of our city’. The novel begins when the narrator, a young woman called Rachel, is picking through Mord’s matted fur while he’s asleep, and discovers a strange creature ‘like a hybrid of sea anemone and squid’. She takes the creature home, names him Borne, and teaches him to talk. Feeding on lizards and ...”

“... when Hill and Timothy became scapegoats for the loss of the slim majority May inherited from David Cameron. But the real surprise wasn’t the downfall of May’s advisers so much as their earlier rise to brief but utter dominance in a party whose upper reaches have in recent times seemed to belong almost exclusively to Old Etonians. Hill was born in ...”

“... mujaddara, or Esau’s pottage.’ In 1933, Hourani went up to Oxford, to read PPE: ‘a very thin young man with luminous green eyes and a diaphanous complexion’, according to his friend Charles Issawi. After graduating, he worked for Chatham House and the Foreign Office, before becoming a fellow of Magdalen and subsequently director of the Middle East ...”

“... optimism of some of the earlier reformers. A recent impressive book by Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village,* suggested that Calvinist theology became especially acceptable to parish élites, the minority who were prospering in the great economic divide of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, as against the mass ...”

“... in later life. Hell, I even called my own son Gregory ‘Jew’ when he began to do arithmetic too young (he was a mathematical genius at age four). It was all jocular. You will note my friendship with Bernard Berenson who was a Jew and very old. In 1955 I wrote him about Ezra ‘who can so disgust me sometimes with his anti-semitism and childish fascism that ...”

“... her glass with embarrassment. The joke, Wollheim explains, is that the painting ‘represents a young aspirant whore coolly bidding up the price for her favours, while the beady-eyed madame of the brothel looks on with simulated indifference’. Comparison with other paintings and with captioned prints of the period does suggest that this is indeed a scene ...”

“... I read it in Heinemann’s Best Short Stories, the annual selection edited by Giles Gordon and David Hughes. I made a mental note of the author’s name, Helen Dunmore, because I’d never heard of her before. A name to watch for, I thought, and watched for it in The Best of Best Short Stories, 1986-95. Dunmore was not included, which I thought a puzzling ...”

“... than Thompson could provide. (Gold Medal signature-writers of the time included John D. MacDonald, David Goodis and that thriller writer’s thriller writer, Peter Rabe.) So during the late Fifties, when most of his proposed literary projects couldn’t find a buyer, Thompson went on to do some of his best work for Stanley Kubrick’s early films, The Killing ...”

“... the time the Roentgens were celebrating their last quiet Christmas outside the limelight in 1895, young Tolman Cunnings was losing an argument in a Canadian bar’ (he, too, was shot: the lodged bullet was shown in an X-ray and extracted; his assailant was convicted, X-ray evidence was used). Then on to the McKinley assassination (he didn’t have an ...”

“... what it was I’d know which direction to go.’ The most eloquent expression of this idea is in David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives (1991): ‘Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition . . . I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom . . . I want to keep breathing and ...”

“... rusting in the weeds, but a few days later we read that the car that belonged to their leader, David Koresh, has been auctioned for $37,500. No word on who gets those big bucks. In the university town of Austin, Texas we begin to see bumper stickers again. They flaunt their hipness: ‘Keep Austin Weird’ is a motto you see on T-shirts and bags, and ...”

“... At the end of David Dabydeen’s poem ‘Coolie Odyssey’ (1988), the poet, deracinated by education, distance and time from the dirt-poor ancestors he is elegising, considers his British audience: congregations of the educated Sipping wine, attentive between courses – See the applause fluttering from their white hands Like so many messy table napkins ...”

“... to. In 1987, in the catalogue published to accompany an exhibition about the Harlem Renaissance, David Levering Lewis referred to Larsen as ‘the mysterious and lovely Virgin Islander’. Eight years later, in When Harlem Was in Vogue, Lewis relayed the (unsourced) information that Larsen was looked down on by ‘some of her fellow Virgin Islanders’ for ...”

“... needs to learn everything. The Cabrini public housing project in Chicago, where Sennett lived as a young boy, gave its inhabitants almost no part to play in decisions about its everyday running. They were managed but not seen, treated as if they couldn’t possibly have any ideas about the structure of their own and other people’s lives – ‘rendered ...”