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“... There are two stories to tell about Paul Robeson – one sad and the other tragic. Both could be constructed from the ample data in this heavy, ill-focused, yet informative concatenation of computerised database, research grant and exclusive access to the subject’s papers. In the first a young Negro of high intelligence, great physical strength and grace, musically talented and gifted with a resonant bass voice, is induced by a dominant white culture to fill various roles – social, professional and indeed dramatic – formulated for blacks to perform ...”

“... and themes which will make enough noise to fill up the silence of the great open spaces. Paul Auster’s Moon Palace is a ‘Western’ novel executed with consummate skill and an unerring feeling for the volume control. His epigraph, from Jules Verne – ‘Nothing can astound an American’ – prepares us for the layers of romantic irony ...”

“... soon after his sister was born, then his father, and Braly ended up in a Catholic boarding-school north of Seattle. Together with a cluster of friends, he began to steal. The boys collected milk and soda bottles from the dump to turn in for deposits, but when the supply of empties dried up, they nicked bottles from neighbourhood garages, then progressed to ...”

“... literary landscape. But perhaps the requisite mixture of courtesy and curiosity no longer exists? Paul Binding’s Babel Guide to Scandinavian Fiction in Translation describes Söderberg as ‘one of the very greatest Swedish writers, disgracefully little known in the English-speaking world’. The second part of the sentence seems almost to follow from the ...”

“... had given way to carbombs. While Heaney in County Wicklow wrote the poems that would go into North, common ground was eroded. Moderates still hoped for power-sharing, but the prospects for compromise were damaged in February 1973, when the Loyalist Association of Workers called a general strike – flexing the industrial muscle which would later destroy ...”

“... 1898, a group in Birmingham began to publish a part work detailing the locomotives of the London & North Western Railway – ‘the Premier Line’, as it styled itself, a boast justified by the excellent standard of its track and its extensive network, stretching from London to Carlisle and South Wales to Yorkshire, with the West Midlands at its centre. The ...”

“... Latin America is judged, but it’s important to remember that Latin America didn’t have a ‘north’, a region with a free labour system in which liberalism could develop. In Latin America, every liberalisation was the result of violent social conflict, from the Túpac Amaru rebellion in the Andes in the 1780s, the 1794 Haitian revolution and the ...”

“... had edited Panorama with a sure hand ... And when Peacock left there was the burly figure of Paul Fox ready to step into his shoes as Controller of BBC 1 ...’ Lumpen-paragraphs sit upon each other gracelessly, heavy with dull and often clumsily conveyed management detail. Michael Swann is a ‘man with a highly distinguished scientific background, a ...”

“... most audacious of creative heists, designed the Pompidou Centre. The proposed new town of Hook in north Hampshire was never built, yet John Gold’s book about its planning became an advertisement for British urbanism: the cannily gauged illustrations persuasively suggest a place both modern and homely. The more or less contemporary new town of Cumbernauld ...”

“... must compete with so many other compulsions that are available – like the two-week fizzle of the North Korean rapprochement; like the prolonged penalty shoot-out of the World Cup (games should begin with extra time); and like the desperate suspense of the Thai kids in that serpentine sequence of underwater caves, with oxygen tanks, lines of fragile links and ...”

“... remains for me a county seen through car or train windows. When I was a child, the Great North Road didn’t begin until we passed the de Havilland works at Hatfield and the Comet, a 1930s roadhouse that is apparently designed ‘to resemble the outline of an aeroplane, with rounded two-storey nose and lower wings’. In front of it stands a column ...”

“... for the liberal paper Novaya gazeta. The vast majority focused on the horrors unfolding in the North Caucasus, bringing them to the attention of a public that was otherwise largely insulated from them by Russia’s domesticated media. Yet though a journalist by profession, Politkovskaya became known as much for her public role as for her writings: in ...”

“... other hand, the traditional Republican elite – the stereotypical Episcopalian financiers of the North-East – has no quarrel with Darwinism or abortion, and is made uneasy by the party’s deference to trailer-park religiosity. And the flat-earthers know when they are being patronised. Old-style Republicans who fail to appreciate the overwhelming ...”

“... colleagues such as Burgess, Nabokov and Amis fils huddling together for warmth at the far end. Paul Theroux’s last novel, My Secret History, deployed a cool transparency of style to great effect in telling a story which appeared to be flagrantly autobiographical: that’s to say, its central character, ‘Andre Parent’, had lived in the same places and ...”

“... except his supercilious brazen bounciness. Hrabal’s style (or at least how it comes through Paul Wilson’s translation) is similarly freewheeling, exuberant, torrential, full of food and drink and wild scenes in cafés and athletic sexual encounters. Much of it strikes me as being more like what the Germans think of as uproariously funny than we ...”