“... when we were in support. The Hun put over some shrapnel-registering shells, I think. Willie Martin and I were in command of Support trench with 3 platoons (Willie is our second captain – a ripping fellow, a regular officer) we got the men in dugouts and were returning to the telephone dugout. We heard the usual whizz and I dropped down and Willie ...”

“... of the Urania, an educational association that hosted popular talks by the likes of Einstein and Thomas Mann; Josef follows a similar track. Adler was pressed into slave labour to help lay a railway line between Prague and Brno, then he was sent to Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and two subcamps of Buchenwald, Niederorschel and Langenstein. He puts Josef through ...”

“... alternatives, he was drawn to the kibbutzim being organised in Palestine, and to the Zionism of Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, who advocated the foundation of a binational state in Palestine, rather than a Jewish one. He stayed at Penn thanks to the presence there of Zellig Harris, a linguist and left-wing Zionist who was interested in ...”

“... and retellings of ancient myth. Everett shares his taste for marrying comedy and philosophy with Thomas Pynchon and the Joseph Heller of Catch-22 and Good as Gold. But there’s only one writer who resembles him in any significant way. Like Everett, J.M. Coetzee was a student of logic who turned to fiction. ‘My name is Eugene Dawn,’ the narrator of his ...”

“... Over the years, the story of his singularity was repeated so often that in 2014 his biographers Martin Lee-Browne and Paul Guinery could still claim that ‘Delius would spend his life composing music that bore no relationship to anything, good or bad, that had been written before.’Delius has been perceived this way in part because he wrote music that was ...”

“... urban labourers or his opposition to American imperialism.)Until recently, Democrats celebrated Thomas Jefferson as the party’s founder, though the author of the Declaration of Independence has fallen into disfavour because of his ownership of slaves. But as Kazin makes clear, the party of the early republic that elected Jefferson to two terms as ...”

“... were evidently independent, well-off and confident in legal matters, like the ‘blackamore’ Martin Francis, who in October 1658 sued three Shadwell women after they defrauded him of £7 – a sizeable sum. But many more ‘belonged’ to others, through ties of servitude or bondage. Even fairly modest households relied on menial servants, and wealthier ...”

“... cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No self-respecting museum would present a combination which was so insouciant art-historically, but it does look very good. The second room is Gallery 12 nearby, diagonally traversed by Dan Flavin’s 1968 piece, knee high and fifty-odd feet long, coolly ...”

“... for men who had found themselves in the excluded middle of the terms male/female. Falwell’s Thomas Road Church in Lynchburg was at the opposite pole of American political culture, a world which reminded FitzGerald of Fifties television commercials: ‘a family at breakfast in a sunlit kitchen, the two tow-headed children clamouring for Sugar Pops or ...”

“... didn’t make it onto the stage until Monday morning; most of the crowd had already left. With Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinated, Nixon in the White House, the Salt I treaty still a few years off and nearly half a million troops in Vietnam, three of those memorable turns were in ‘protest’ mode: Havens’s sampling of the 19th-century ...”

“... secret, missing truth. In less paranoid ages ignorance may just be ignorance. Underworld , like Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon , is in this sense a post-paranoid novel. When one of DeLillo’s characters thinks of ‘the paranoid élite’, we are meant to catch the friendly irony, the flicker of nostalgia. These are people who believe that the first ...”

“... denunciation of the British administration in India, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. We don’t need theology or metaphysics to understand the enduring legacy of slavery or colonial brutality. We know the social dynamics. In the United States, for example, slavery and segregation were, for a ...”

“... rooms miraculously transformed into gallery spaces. Finally, a particularly eccentric outpost, Thomas Hirschhorn’s plywood and packing tape temple in honour of Georges Bataille, was erected in the middle of a low-income housing project.Documenta, whose original mission had been to celebrate Germany’s new postwar identity and the transnational role of ...”

“... for them. But what if we all wrote each other’s novels? What a lot of heartache that would save. Martin writes Michele’s, Rose writes Irvine’s, Colm writes Antonia’s, Ian writes Iain’s, Henry writes George’s (no, they’re dead). Or perhaps they did. And maybe Naim Attallah wrote Ghosting by Jennie Erdal. And perhaps we don’t need to know, or ...”

“... printing Greek books. Venice was a city of printers and readers. In his World of Aldus Manutius, Martin Lowry made a rough guess that, in 1500, Venetian presses produced twenty books per member of the city’s population. There were more printshops – and more booksellers, stationers, bookbinders – in Venice than anywhere else in Europe: twice as many ...”