“... one spiritual cul-de-sac after another. The Decadents likened the Mass to Wagner’s operas as a means of refining and intensifying bodily sensations. Sexuality and piety joined in sin and its exciting absolution in the confessional. Decadents who embraced Catholicism accordingly avoided the boring feuds about papal authority or the interpretation of Aquinas ...”

“... palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment. At the same time, the story of Libya in 2011 gives ...”

“... tapering sides marked with corrugated rings, like a rocket engine scratched from the final cut of David Lynch’s Dune. The concert was at the top, and in order to get to it I passed through an exhibition of art created since the invasion, Ty Yak? How Are You? One of the curators, the artist Katya Libkind, had left a comment on the walls: ‘Basically it’s ...”

“... matters stood, the Congress high command took the view that ‘the independence of Bengal really means in present circumstances the dominance of the Moslem League in Bengal,’ and the party rallied behind the Mahasabha, with joint meetings whipping up Hindu demands for Bengal’s partition, Gandhi in support. When the question was put to the Bengal ...”

“... would then be available for somebody else. Households would sort themselves according to their means along the chain of accommodations, from luxurious to cheap, but crucially, the chain itself would lengthen. Eventually there would be so many new houses that prices and rents would fall, and somewhere at the cheap end of the chain, Misgina and her family ...”

“... ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first novel about a dinner of sea urchins, ‘heaped in a great armorial pile … like the unexplained detail on the hill by the thistles and the hermitage of a quattrocento background’, followed by a plain grilled loup and no ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... then on to Malawi and Zimbabwe, in November 1991, will underestimate the hardiness and courage of David Livingstone, who traversed, on foot, thousands of miles of bush, mountain and swamp, fearsome to behold even from the air. But Livingstone’s country had not been unknown to the Portuguese, established on both east and west coast for centuries. The term ...”

“... letters, packed with insight and wonderful phrases, are quoted in Brett Millier’s biography, in David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet and in Lorrie Goldensohn’s Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. ‘What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... teenage boys, meanwhile, knew it wouldn’t be long before they were married off, occasionally by means of adverts their parents had placed in the matrimonial columns of the ethnic press. ‘Respectable family seeking suitable match for their son: sincere, clean-shaven, fair, chemical engineering MSc, enjoys his fitness routines and believes in high moral ...”

“... parties remains activated in the present stand-off. Economic tensions, carefully explained by David Styan in Unfinished Business, have continued to simmer, while old ideological grievances between the Tigrayan and Eritrean movements, exacerbated by the TPLF’s constitution for a post-Cold War Ethiopia, have given way to something like hatred. One of the ...”

“... 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 ...”