“... 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 ...”

“... line, a first-person narrative by the writer himself. The narrative recounts his meeting with the young woman who will become his typist. This structure continues for some twenty pages. Then the page splits into three and the typist gets her own first-person narrative. From now on the three modes occupy almost every page of the novel, although every now and ...”

“... anyone solicited the letter written by a woman who sent a package of goods to the soldier Arnon David Grabow. She told him she had been in Auschwitz, where her husband and four children were murdered. In Segev’s world of facts and common sense, ‘soliciting’ is what happens when an officer or commissar-figure knocks on an old lady’s door and ...”

“... festivals. Surprisingly perhaps, there were more Americans than Belgians, and the majority were young, born between 1800 and 1810. Whether this reflects the overall composition of the visitors, or merely of those who thought it would be fun to sign the visitors’ book, is unknowable. The big fish Brewer catches is Charles Babbage, who came in ...”

“... with photographs of the ‘passionate attitudes’ that Charcot had elicited from his young female patients. The debt to Freud ran deeper still: without free association there was no automatic writing, which Breton explored with Philippe Soupault as early as 1920 in Les Champs magnétiques, and both the interpretation of dreams and the analysis of ...”

“... interested in ‘modes of solitude’; Checkout 19 gives us a portrait of the artist as a girl and young woman, reading her way into herself, discovering her vocation as a writer. In Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, the protagonist is a writer, and her writing has consequences in the world: winning her a readership and prizes (this tracks with Bennett’s own ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Back when the Independent was young and thriving, the paper used to sponsor lunchtime ‘theatre conferences’ at the Edinburgh Festival in association with the Traverse. The description ‘theatre conferences’ makes these public discussions sound starchier than they were. I was happy to do my bit chairing events in exchange for the train fare and somewhere to sleep ...”

“... and thighs covered with scars – broad weals and lashes’. A ‘big splendid-looking Boras young man – with a broad good-humoured face like an Irishman – had a fearful cut on his left buttock. It was the last scab of what had been a very bad flogging. The flesh for the size of a saucer was black and scarred, and this crown of raw flesh was the size ...”

“... doesn’t help that the IPs we get to hear about are usually the celebrities: Elton John and David Furnish; Annie Leibovitz; Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Surrogacy is one of those subjects on which ‘colour-blind – white – feminism’ tends not to mince words. ‘A human-rights violation’, the journalist Julie Bindel called it in 2018 when the ...”

“... the means of joy, be also supplied by their local councils.’ In 1930, an MP observed that a young person today lives in a municipal house, and he washes himself … in municipal water. He rides on a municipal tram or omnibus, and I have no doubt that before long he will be riding in a municipal aeroplane. He walks on a municipal road; he is educated in ...”

“... him, however, and Watt was charged with high treason, along with an elderly goldsmith called David Downie, who was unfortunate enough to be at the meeting at which Watt disclosed his crackpot plan. The government was keen to persuade the jury and public opinion (though it was certainly not true) that the Edinburgh plot was part of a co-ordinated ...”

“... at a million pounds apiece, will be painted European green and dispersed to other barracks. David Cameron announced in December 2013 that the troops could come home because their mission had been accomplished. ‘The prime minister’s declaration of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to forget about Afghanistan,’ Jack ...”

“... Jeremy Harding reads extracts from his essay about migration. The full article is below. A young, personable man who speaks fair English, Hamraz had been in Dunkirk for about a month when we met. He was a member of the Afghan National Army, from the district of Azra, south-east of Kabul. Early in 2011, going home on leave, he was called to account by ...”