“... without air, the lid being down, so to speak, a 1912 fragrance sifting to the left corner where we read ‘La Merveille’ and escape. (‘Roses’) Guest died in 2006, and this Collected Poems amasses work from more than 20 books. She also wrote art and poetry criticism, a novel and a biography of the Imagist poet H.D. She became known as a poet in the ...”

“... exceeds six thousand pages. We have been shown only the 525-page summary, but any American can read it, and the director of the CIA, John Brennan, offered no challenge to the facts. Exactly 119 detainees were held at CIA sites in various countries from 17 September 2001 to 22 January 2009. It is the first official tally since Michael Hayden, a CIA director ...”

“... London Review of Books that I am the author of this review. You can of course go to a bookshop and read the dustjacket. But have you personally checked the reliability of dustjackets, or of dustjackets from Oxford University Press? As for the existence and location of a country called Australia, many people know of it only from maps, teachers and TV ...”

“... Plaza soirée (I understand that the Plaza has brushed up its act since being taken over by Donald Trump), and this time Roy Cohn again produced ‘Mary’, but in a more daring outfit. ‘He had a red dress on, and a black feather boa around his neck. He was dressed like an old flapper.’ This was too much for Mrs Rosenstiel, who fell out with her ...”

“... mile after mile with clanging, sparking shipyards, and every shop-sign in West Blackhall Street read ‘SCWS’ – Scottish Co-Operative Wholesale Society. When I returned nearly 50 years later, the yards had vanished. There were a few charity shops, an Asda; in grey housing schemes up the hillside, a shrunken population waited quietly for the council to ...”

“... borrowers of European forms’ but sterile imitators of those forms. To argue that Donald Barthelme, Ronald Sukenick, William Gaddis and company belong to some contemporary American avant-garde is to rationalise the fact that they have no audience. Karl cites as instances of writers misunderstood in their day the case of Melville, condemned to ...”

“... She is propositioned for sex by randy Europeans and responds to the indignation of a woman who has read in the newspaper that one in eight young people has never seen a cow in real life.The first part of the novel becomes a satire of white guilt as it’s performed and experienced online. ‘White people,’ she observes, ‘were suddenly feeling compelled to ...”

“... to think whether the Arab Spring might undermine the need for jihad. A couple of pages later, we read what seem likely to be the thoughts of Mariam, who probably transcribed the document, on the ‘new vision’ of al-Qaida that her father was planning to announce on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.Bin Laden had four wives: Najwa, Khairiah, Siham ...”

“... converted the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. Six members of the group – among them, its leader, Donald DeFreeze – died in a Los Angeles police shoot-out in May 1974, and a further three (including Hearst) were arrested 14 months later. Escaping arrest, Soliah had gone underground, changed her name to Sara Jane Olson and built a new life for herself as the ...”

“... not stand for laissez-faire liberalism and the banishment of the state from the marketplace? Donald Winch’s major revisionist interpretation in Adam Smith’s Politics (1978) accurately mapped Smith’s intellectual project, and the important, but far from all-encompassing, role played by political economy within his scheme of statecraft. Winch, an ...”

“... intimacy that was sometimes called “the American way of life”’. This was in 1997, when Donald Trump was divorcing Marla Marples. It would be a mistake to think that feelings are flimsy, ephemeral things; for Berlant, structures of feeling guaranteed the durability of conservative cultural politics.In the final book of the trilogy, The Female ...”

“... really has the power to renew itself, I’d better write something for these younger chaps to read ... I planned a longish poem, about 750 lines, which I finished about a month ago and have just revised and sent off to Poetry Chicago today. I believe it is the best thing I’ve done.’ As we close in on the centenary of Basil Bunting’s birth at ...”

“... up with them, but the memory of what it is like to do philosophy or geology remains; and when I read about debates that are going on in these areas I believe I know, even if I cannot follow it all, what kind of row or celebration is taking place. Subject-styles, back then, were well reflected in the content of bookshelves. The geologists had ...”

“... and ‘the smell of hay still opens a path to the farthest and fondest places in me.’To read Heaney’s memories of his early life is to find not only rural, familial experience (hauling sacks of grain, buying eggs from ‘the egg man’ and the like) but rural and local words: ‘A “groop” [was] a sunk trench in the concrete floor … to drain ...”

“... much as to say that, over the centuries, the common reader, who (it is a hundred to one) has never read the Farther Adventures, has not been in a position to appreciate Robinson Crusoe. A more plausible ethical interpretation is proposed by Laura Curtis in The Elusive Daniel Defoe. It is that we are to relate the island life constructed by Robinson Crusoe to ...”