“... well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of these writers – however popular or influential, however frequently their writing appeared in the Paris Review or Conjunctions or the year-end Best American and Pushcart anthologies – managed to stir him. The ‘tone of mandarin ...”

“... more down-to-earth expression of the idea that reading novels can make us better people. Briony, a young girl who will become a writer known for her ‘impartial psychological realism’, experiences an epiphany after witnessing a scene played out – incomprehensibly to her – between Robbie and Cecilia, her older sister: She sensed she . . . could write ...”

“... Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip ...”

“... the Cold (1963). ‘It could,’ he said, ‘be turned into an opera.’ Le Carré – that is, David Cornwell, an ex-spy – once said that he entered the secret world ‘in the spirit of John Buchan and left it in the spirit of Kafka’; allowing for quite a lot of exaggeration at both ends, it’s a reasonable comment on The Spy who Came in from the ...”

“... patients, avoiding sociable contact with the staff and the carrying of a key.’ The third was a young British psychiatrist who, during his National Service, was assigned to a psychiatric unit at a military hospital, where he openly flouted the rules forbidding the staff from talking to patients, and ‘hung out’ with a manic patient in a padded cell at ...”

“... Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but embarrassingly arch greeting to David Livingstone when he ‘found’ him in Ujiji in November 1871 – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – as well as for his silly ‘Stanley cap’ (like a chamberpot with holes and a tea-towel flapping at the sides), he has always been every historian’s ...”

“... the cover. Nobody will read their Divine Comedy as an ideal translation. Perhaps it will draw in young readers, but there’s an odd awkwardness to the street language embedded with the rolling names of medieval Italian sinners and elaborate scenarios of Dante’s tortures. The classics lend themselves to adaptation – the Odyssey to Dublin in 1904 or the ...”

“... are not variable confessions but different worlds, and different instruments of understanding. David Kepesh in The Dying Animal offers a strong sidelight on Roth in The Plot against America, a comic view of liberty and nation which darkens and widens in the new novel. Kepesh, divorced and determined never to make the mistake of marriage again, takes true ...”

“... Muslim’ and pray in a part of the mosque reserved for activists. Falik introduced Husain to the Young Muslim Organisation. Operating from the East London mosque, its members ran kung fu classes and football tournaments; they put up posters and wore T-shirts advertising their Islamic identity. Several had been in prison or belonged to gangs. Husain writes ...”

“... resources – oil, gas, diamonds, and copper flogged off at dirt-cheap prices to a few incredulous young bankers – a criminal act? Glenny calls it ‘quite simply, the grandest larceny in history’. The sell-off certainly gave a huge boost to organised crime. The billionaire oligarchs Yeltsin created were not themselves syndicate gangsters; their own ...”

“... afford to purchase all the journals their researchers need, what hope do the rest of us have?’ David Prosser, executive director of Research Libraries UK, asked the Guardian. When Swartz was 21, he and three other unidentified authors wrote the ‘Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto’, the text of which is included in The Boy Who Could Change the World. It ...”

“... concludes with a photograph of the poet striding towards the camera. He is a tallish, handsome young man. The photograph was taken in the autumn of 1955 when he was 28, shortly after he arrived in Montpellier to begin his Fulbright Fellowship. He looks to have the world at his feet. Earlier that year Ashbery had been turned down by the Fulbright committee ...”

“... Baghdad, and that the Iraqi army could not get them out. Earlier that month Barack Obama had told David Remnick of the New Yorker that, compared to al-Qaida, IS was a junior varsity basketball team playing out of its league; a few months later its fighters emerged from the desert to defeat six Iraqi army divisions and capture Mosul. Wary of making the same ...”

“... forces that coalesced around the 2016 referendum had been gathering strength since 2010. David Cameron went into that year’s general election with an undeliverable pledge to reduce net immigration to less than a hundred thousand a year, a target he never came remotely close to hitting. With each quarterly announcement of the figures, the ...”

“... common-sense gun laws’, then the NRA takes to the airwaves, ideally with an attractive young mother as its spokeswoman. She’ll say: gun control doesn’t work, it just keeps law-abiding folks from protecting their children, since criminals will always find a way to get guns. In Chicago they have some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, and ...”