“... money off kids in bars, grab at girls, shout ‘I’m Jack Kerouac, the world-famous author!’ He may now be the sort of writer whose life is just as well known as his writing. When I reached the area near Columbia University, I remembered that as a student young Kerouac had looked out of his Livingston Hall dormitory straight at a frieze on the side of the ...”

“... few, Russian or foreign historians and journalists, some of whom are apt to exaggerate what they may have read. Others again are either closed or not even known to exist (it is clear that, all over Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, officials carried off bundles of documents to serve as an investment against an uncertain future). And, as Gaddis ...”

“... New York Beauty will be delirious or will not be. Luckily, we have the example of Koolhaas, who may be the most gifted architect-polemicist since Le Corbusier; like Corb he possesses panache in both design and writing, and media charisma, too. Born in Holland in 1944, Koolhaas first worked as a journalist and screenwriter in Amsterdam, and his approach to ...”

“... for independent realities. But Hegel realised that Kant’s analogy was not perfect. Cosmologists may be able to discount their earthly existence and envisage the solar system from the point of view of a sun with themselves circling round it on the surface of a spinning planet; but a philosopher could never lay aside the fundamental forms of human experience ...”

“... as ‘think’, ‘deem’, ‘reck’, ‘imagine’, ‘remember’ and ‘forget’. Actions may be straightforward, but the mental torture that produces them – and which they produce – isn’t. ‘The rest thou dost already know,’ the hero of The Giaour tells the friar who shrives him at the end of the story, ‘all my sins, and half my ...”

“... states in Africa and Asia and no doubt Latin America as well (Cuba and Venezuela spring to mind) may wish to consider why the Jamahiriyya, despite mending its fences with Washington and London in 2003-4 and dealing reasonably with Paris and Rome, should have proved so vulnerable to their sudden hostility. And the Libyan war should also prompt us to examine ...”

“... General Smith’s book speaks of CNN fighting, rather than merely reporting, the war. Indeed, this may well be the first time a major American television news network has so openly collaborated with the propaganda machine of the US military. Peter Arnett, it seems clear in retrospect, was mainly useful as a way of creating the illusion of controversy and ...”

“... experiencing old age and bodily decline (‘Diabetes is now affecting both eyes, though what this may symbolise I can’t say’). And for a lot of the time it is a poem preoccupied with poetry: there are numerous one-line aphoristic definitions of ‘poem’ throughout, both weighty (‘Poem as cradle of the unbiddable name’) and flighty (‘Poem as equity ...”

“... American edition inscribed by her mother in black ink: ‘Edna Fischel, April 1900’, or ‘May 1900’ – she seems to have accumulated them as they appeared, the name and location of the publishers changing midway through the edition. A couple of the volumes are underlined and annotated in Martha’s hand. She probably read them during the ...”

“... of private lives to illustrate his themes. It is in these private histories, he writes, ‘that we may find . . . the unseen threads of a common Russian sensibility such as Tolstoy had imagined in his dancing scene’. Since Peter the Great, however, this ‘common Russian sensibility’ always contained a European admixture, and Figes criticises those ...”

“... Lynching Memorial.* And German reparations over the past half-century are a model – precedent may be a better word – for Neiman and many others who argue in favour of some form of reparations for slavery. They seem to demonstrate moral principle in action at a national level. Dressed in its memorial trappings, Berlin today is the Nazi capital in ...”

“... of literary art, when functioning successfully as such, have any intimate engagement with what may be called knowledge?’ – our reasons for asking it are different, and so is our idea of what might constitute an interesting answer. Walsh thought that the disengagement of literature from direct knowledge claims might ‘be seen as the liberation of ...”

“... pure form of ‘Stalinism in the East’ goes back to the 1940s, and was constantly reinforced by Robert Scalapino, a Cold War scholar who came to prominence in the late 1950s. North Korea was indeed Stalinist in its state-run industrialisation drive, and modelled its administration and much of its system on Stalin’s Russia – but so did every other ...”

“... the poet drifts morosely into the evening / which never satisfies him, while sober, / but which may offer the chance to write “about” it.’ Doctored autobiography will no longer be exploited. The ‘I’ of these anorexic pamphlets will be replaced by the avuncular ‘we’ of the biographies. (It’s like a small private company being floated on the ...”

“... In most cases the word in French simply means ‘manly’ or ‘masculine’, or as Le Petit Robert tells us, ‘having the moral characteristics often attributed to men: active, energetic, courageous etc’. In the chapter on ‘The Lesbian’, Beauvoir is constantly made to speak of ‘virile’ and ‘viriloid’ women, when she means women who are ...”