“... novels that are praised on social media as ‘discursive’ and ‘weird’ (e.g. the work of Benjamin Labatut or Jenny Erpenbeck). Unfortunately, Creation Lake is a sloppy book whose careless construction and totalising cynicism come to feel downright hostile. As I read, I kept wondering, why did you even write this?Sadie Smith (the name did make me ...”

“... ten thousand women, hundreds with young children. Several were well known: Hannah Arendt; Dora Benjamin, Walter’s sister; Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of Lion; the actress Dita Parlö, whose character falls in love with Jean Gabin’s in La Grande Illusion; Lisa Fittko, a passeuse who risked her life guiding scores of refugees out of France across the ...”

“... exorcise the fetid miasma of the Millennium Dome on the Greenwich peninsula. The Dome wasn’t a black hole – even though it was costing us £240,000 a month to keep it empty – it was more of a hole in the head, a throbbing non-presence. It had never really been there, and its special status, Banquo’s ghost at the New Labour feast, was a confidence ...”

“... literature on contemporary attitudes towards animals generally, and towards pets in particular. Black Beauty is mentioned in passing, but nowhere do we hear about the Romanticism that may have helped shape the strong and affectionate feelings that Germans even now hold for animals and nature; nor do we meet Eliot’s cats or Kipling’s rich ...”

“... that appeared in response to the Covid pandemic and the autonomous zones asserted during the Black Lives Matter uprisings. Nevertheless, for all the fearmongering about antifa (as if to be anti-fascist was a bad thing), anarchism may be another arena where the right has largely muscled out the left. The battle cry of Steve Bannon and gang in ...”

“... 1949. A brass band played as guests chose from a Mitteleuropean selection of drinks: champagne, black coffee or Alma’s favourite, Bénédictine (by the end of her life, she was drinking a bottle a day). In the dining room, an abundant buffet was laid out. Luminaries from the ‘German California’ scene came to pay homage to the widow of the composer ...”

“... to burnish his culture wars résumé. Also disgraceful was the disenfranchisement of Florida’s black electorate on his watch. Florida election officials, ostensibly looking to prevent felons from casting ballots, worked from lists riddled with errors and mistaken entries, with the result that more than 12,000 qualified ...”

“... and little magazines – Divers Press (with Ann), Origin (with Corman), and then (with Olson) Black Mountain Review, named for Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where Olson became rector and in 1954 brought Creeley to teach. Creeley, Olson and Corman would soon see themselves, with some justice, as part of a ...”

“... understanding of Marxism. By the 1970s he is writing in New Society about Victor Serge and Walter Benjamin, independent Marxists who were opposed to the Party line or idiosyncratic in their interpretation of Marxist theory. Serge was a former anarchist who was soon expelled from the Party and ended up as a ‘left oppositionist’, disenchanted with Stalinism ...”

“... ekphrastic tours de force. The composition hangs on a palette-knife edge between light and shadow, black and white; the opposite of a friendly gentleman tipping his hat on the street, the tuxedoed artist confronts us, glowering, his right hand cocked at his hip, his left nonchalantly holding a burning cigarette. ‘What we have here,’ Beckmann claimed, ‘is ...”

“... informers on the other.Given these prejudices, it’s lucky that it was not I but the fair-minded Benjamin Nathans who set out to write the history of Soviet dissidents. He likes them, but stays this side of idolatry. Their appeal as oddballs with strong, if not always logical, convictions and an instinctive resistance to authority is clear from his ...”

“... and resourceful, as submissive and difficult, as it had to be for the sake of his mission.Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Image of Proust’To create in myself a nation with its own politics, parties and revolutions, and to be all of it, everything, to be God in the real pantheism of this people-I.Fernando Pessoa, The Book of DisquietIt is the first or Christian ...”

“... who saw it as a ‘country of lynchers’, turned to it for inspiration, drawing on the work of Black writers such as Richard Wright and Chester Himes. America is a ‘battlefield’, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, ‘and you can only become passionate about the battle it is waging with itself, in which the stakes are beyond measure.’Since Beauvoir made this ...”

“... Catholic. He was still only in his early twenties, and it was understandable perhaps that when Benjamin Haydon saw him at a court ball he looked like a ‘kept pet, frightened to sit, frightened to stand’. That he managed to make a success of his marriage and find a role in public life speaks powerfully of Albert’s sense of duty, his patience and his ...”

“... shed, but he opposed the efforts of Oxford’s rising liberals to tidy up Christianity. He found Benjamin Jowett’s Hegelised Plato a poor substitute for St Paul and skipped Matthew Arnold’s poetry lectures because they clashed with cricket matches. All the same, he thrived. He won a fellowship at Merton. He translated French roundelays and befriended ...”