“... in philosophical method was logical positivism, channelled into Language, Truth and Logic by a young A.J. Ayer. Ayer proclaimed the verification principle: that only statements open to empirical verification can be meaningful. It didn’t take long for critics to notice that the verification principle cannot be empirically verified. Likewise, Machery may ...”

“... Barry Hannah, Diane Williams and Mary Robison.One of the best accounts of Lish’s influence is in David Leavitt’s roman à clef Martin Bauman; Or, a Sure Thing. He appears in the first paragraph of the first chapter disguised as Stanley Flint, a creative writing teacher and human resources nightmare:Wild rumours circulated about this seminar. It was said ...”

“... unbreakable spirit to win! Fighting the Hun with pepper? Was that something that Jimmy Perry and David Croft, the fecund scriptwriters of Dad’s Army, dreamed up in a dizzy moment? Not so. Charles Graves, an early historian of the Home Guard, refers to a unit which suggested in orders that any rudimentary weapons ‘could be usefully supplemented by a ...”

“... friend and protégé of Robert Capa, who works for the Magnum agency, and has disappeared. A young man, our narrator, meets Jansen (‘when I was 19’) and offers to sort and catalogue his work. Jansen is friendly, but aloof, distracted, avoiding all his old friends, not answering the telephone, hiding from visitors. He is plainly living in the ...”

“... assassinations. On 4 May a man with explosives attached to his body blew himself up in a queue of young men trying to join the police in Arbil, killing 60 of them and wounding 150. Ghassan Attiyah, a political commentator in Baghdad, told me that ‘the Kurds were able to destabilise Iraq for half a century under Saddam Hussein and his predecessors. The Sunni ...”

“... surprisingly long time, but when scandal finally came in 1996 – a currency trader called Robert Young, working in cahoots with Cantrade Bank, a Jersey subsidiary of the Swiss banking giant UBS, defrauded investors of $26 million – the Wall Street Journal concluded that Jersey was an offshore hazard ‘living off lax regulation and political ...”

“... but it would be more accurate to describe him as the ‘evil genius’ of his brother-in-law David Séchard, printer, inventor, mere technician and thus true man of the 19th century, who pays dearly for being over-impressed by Lucien’s intellectuality. ‘His fatal, innocent error is to suppose that Lucien’s lofty gift is superior to his modst ...”

“... farm), they didn’t need financial recompense, and she was scathing about the consumer items young Americans coveted. Yet she too insisted that the disagreement need not imperil the women’s friendship. Their lively interest in each other’s values and beliefs, she wrote, could only advance the cause of world peace.Peri’s discoveries provide a new ...”

“... Aviv, Joshua Rivkin, Chiara Barzini), in the fictional footnotes, and real people (Kathy Acker, David Bowie, Connie Converse) in the fiction, and real people (Susan Sontag, Fleur Jaeggy, Kaitlin Phillips) in the real endnotes. Lacey has said her intent was random and irreverent – ‘There’s no hidden agenda or code,’ she told the New York Times ...”

“... information. As she remarks, things are always turning up: Otto Gross’s love letters to the young Frieda von Richthofen; evidence of Lawrence’s un-incandescent affair with Rosalind Baynes (extravagantly described by Maddox as ‘a return to endogamy’, ‘the choice of a deeply English woman, rather than a foreigner, as a love object’); above ...”

“... I recall this event from over thirty years ago with peculiar vividness. There are lots of young people for whom Wittgenstein’s simple but sculpted sentences are tremendously charged. Pears tells us, in a characteristically more distanced and impersonal way, that he was one of that number, long ago taken by Tractatus, even if he understood hardly a ...”

“... Clennell Wilkinson, the pompous and plagiaristic Ellis Roberts. And there were writers who, like David Garnett, simply couldn’t manage the world of journalistic deadlines. Today, leftish journals face an ever-widening gulf between the concerns of ‘cultural politics’ and the day-to-day agenda of professional politicians, which remains overwhelmingly ...”

“... to an age in which the notion of a radical mass movement has become, not least for those too young to remember one, a contradiction in terms. Davenport-Hines sees the Post-Modern as the latest resurgence of Gothic – a self-confirming case to some extent, since he tends to read the latter in terms of the former. But he has a point even so. The speech of ...”

“... cause of poverty is poverty. The impoverished are more likely to be unemployed, to be ill, to die young, to have illegitimate children, to be violent, to thieve, to be semi-literate, to be heroin addicts, primarily because they are poor. A social welfare policy which simply gave the poor large amounts of money would be more efficacious than anything we do at ...”

“... was heavily promoted by the Rockefellers (Nelson, Governor of New York, and his brother David, head of the Chase Manhattan Bank), partly because it promised to raise real estate values and create new office space by displacing hundreds of small enterprises. Meanwhile, the Port of New York Authority rebuilt the docks across the Hudson River while ...”