“... title of a first short-story collection is always ‘Stories for ME You Doubting Fucks!’ which means there is a quality to them that is missing from subsequent books. In CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, which appeared in 1996, this quality is so forceful that it strides across the landscape as an actual figure. The setting is the Chicago of Saunders’s ...”

“... Ghanaians, Communist Party etc.’ There wasn’t much truth in these claims. ‘At its height,’ David Gibbs writes in The Political Economy of Third World Intervention (1991), ‘the communist intervention in the Congo comprised no more than 380 Soviets and Czechoslovaks – against 14,000 UN troops and many thousands of Belgian military ...”

“... shopping bag to the brim with receipts for me.Hollywood was a company town. The studios owned the means of production and I learned fast that a lot of its labour was alienated. In my ongoing contractual negotiations with the 20th Century Fox lawyers, I began to see why. Even at the outset, the studio contract announced the spirit of Hollywood ...”

“... remaking society according to their lights.In 2022 the billionaires William Oberndorf and David Sacks, former COO of PayPal, pumped money into a successful recall campaign against Boudin, shortly after his election as district attorney. A total of $7 million was donated to the effort, 80 per cent of it in amounts of $50,000 or more, $600,000 from ...”

“... When his growing family needed more space, and television versions of his books provided the means, he bought a timber-framed Tudor house (due to be demolished) for a pound, disassembled it and moved it eighteen miles to sit next to the hall. The cover of Powsels and Thrums shows an image by Garner’s wife, Griselda, of the two buildings, with one of ...”

“... only TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’ On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who is Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby airport. It’s a giant mail ...”

“... Muslim Brothers’ Freedom and Justice Party. Both have been widely misunderstood. Tamarrod, which means ‘disobedience, insubordination, revolt, rebellion’ (and ‘mutiny’), is the name of the group that organised first a nationwide petition against President Morsi and then the demonstrations of 30 June. It’s a new group, founded this April. The ...”

“... are lost but not destroyed, hidden but perhaps not for ever, is what this unconventional biography means by ‘memory’. Not so much memories as things forgotten and found again. Remembrance.Anyway, Nicodemus, my 17th-century religious fanatic, was making his way from the Midlands to the Fens – to Ely, in fact, because he had a vision that the fenland ...”

“... Naples; and a decade since the first Aids fiction started to show up: Robert Ferro’s Second Son, David B. Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed, Allen Barnett’s beautiful The Body and Its Dangers. Today, as a result of political pressure as well as recognition of a growing gay readership, gay sections can be found in most bookshop chains, and independent gay ...”

“... technique changed a great deal in the 20th century, at least in the English-speaking world. David Lodge argues in Consciousness in the Novel that a generation starting to publish in the shadow of modernist masterworks chose to emphasise externals rather than psychological depth, with characters whose spoken words were almost ostentatiously distanced ...”

“... rewrite the memoir several times: she felt he’d been an unwholesome influence (which probably means she knew he was a homosexual) and was presuming on Brooke’s decision to make him his literary executor. The result was an airbrushed version of those aspects of Brooke’s life that Marsh and Mrs Brooke knew about, and there were many about which they ...”

“... iced water, was a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you ...”

“... is pianofurty … The furty stands for the deep notes on your left-hand side. Piano, of course, means our friends on the right.’ From there, our wits go on to discuss the Emperor Nero: The biggest ruffian of the lot … Now that fellow was a thorough bags, say what you like … When the city of Rome … the holy city and the centre and the heart of the ...”

“... that they could not be Borked. Stealth has its own dangers. Bush thought he had a neo-con in David Souter, but he had been misinformed. He did a better job the next time. Clarence Thomas had arrived in Washington at the age of 31, and never left the Beltway thereafter, so his neo-con development could be carefully monitored. At 43, he had put in loyal ...”

“... in April 1586, the Papal Nuncio refers to ‘Giovanni Dee e il zoppo suo compagno’ – zoppo means ‘lame’. It is possible that Kelley was disabled in some way (and disability is traditionally associated with the psychic powers he claimed). There is a reference, during one of the séances, to his difficulty in kneeling. And then there is the question ...”