“... army or completely lacking in discipline; it may be ascetic or eudemonist in spirit; energetic or slack; thinking only of the future or the day; warlike and nationalist or peaceful and internationalist; equalitarian or the opposite; it may have the ethics of lords or the ethics of slaves; its art may be subjective or objective; its forms of life ...”

“... the popular biographies of Verlaine, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Erasmus, Nietzsche, Dickens etc, which Paul Bailey, an admirer of at least some of Zweig’s fiction, describes as ‘slightly embarrassing’; the lectures and statements and appeals; the intermittent plays and the libretto (for Richard Strauss); and all the stories and novellas, mainly framed ...”

“... in stupid people, or expired in the brilliant from over-exertion. It was there to take up the slack when the other was feeling under the weather or was simply worn out. One hemisphere, some thought, could act as a kind of cerebral chaperone, overseeing the malevolent acts that might be favoured by its twin. The trouble was – and here is where the ...”

“... respect of professional critics, who are favoured: V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, David Storey, Paul Scott, Iris Murdoch, for instance. Beyond that it isn’t easy to see much significance in the list – perhaps there’s a nostalgia for the old Empire (Scott, J.G. Farrell, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, plus Nadine Gordimer, Naipaul, and P.H. Newby on ...”

“... idea came out of his love for stories about gamblers, such as Walter Tevis’s The Hustler and Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance. For the Singapore sections, he reread a fair amount of Graham Greene. The idea of a man whose life is changed by an operation on his face was inspired by the John Frankenheimer thriller Seconds, in which John Randolph is given ...”

“... preferred today. Enough material there for a whole case-history. Notwithstanding the title of Paul Alexander Juutilainen’s recent film docubiog about Marcuse, Herbert the Hippopotamus, the slack-sphinctered pachyderm in LaRouche’s first sentence refers not to Marcuse, late consort of Korsch, Davis and the ...”

“... like Kötting. Negative nurses, in black PVC, attempt to inflate a benign corpse, to resuscitate slack flesh, crank a dead engine. They step back to admire their handiwork, their victim. It is Kötting, every time; he confesses. The story cooks the glue of memory: his father, a house in the suburbs, a wardrobe. His older brother, Pete, was short. Kötting ...”

“... knuckles and brought one hand up to join the other. The arch of his right foot tautened and the slack weight of his body hung between these extremities, slung like a carcass from a pole. He could not hold himself here for long. A vague outswelling created an overhang whose brow rolled back out of sight. He thought of the arc his arm must follow and the ...”

“... appreciative of language. The colours were too bright perhaps.7 March. Read and enjoy Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts about the lure of in-between places and the edges of cities and other communities. I feel I was on to this years ago in my play The Old Country, when Hilary, a spy in the Foreign Office, describes the venues where he met ...”

“... The poem ‘Like Earning a Living’ is full of such distaste: What’s an elephant? I say to the slack-mouthed girl who answers back, a trainee ventriloquist, then smirks at Donna. She dunno. Nor does the youth with the face. And what would that say, fingered? I know, Video. Big Mac. Lager. Lager. What like’s a wart-hog? Come on. A weary ‘Come ...”

“... players and policies. The gifted Jeremy Guscott doesn’t always deliver the ball when he should. Paul Ackford ‘made his Test debut against us at Twickenham at the ripe old age of 30 years nine months! You can’t accuse the Poms of rushing players into international rugby before they are ready for it, can you?’ I am not an expert on the rules of the ...”

“... but in the economic or cultural heartland of the global American imperium. Except for Jane and Paul Bowles in Morocco, only Robert Stone and Joan Didion suggest themselves, and neither of them is associated closely with any one setting. On the whole, American writers seem convinced that the vital features of their society are most clearly discernible at ...”

“... it has a deal to offer: a subject with a cult following, but also with a certain amount of slack in his reputation (‘almost certainly Lowry is the least-known British literary genius of the 20th century,’ Bowker says, a little flatly); action (or its substitute, relocation); eloquence and wit in its subject’s presentation of himself, a human ...”

“... in The Transit of Venus as ‘a parched unvisited mystery, a forlorn horizon strung on a strand of slack barbed wire’, a country that ‘required apologies, and was almost a subject for ribaldry’. In choosing ‘the elsewhere of books’ (in particular, according to her own legend, the poems of Leopardi) as her method of escape from antipodean ...”

“... scribble, scribble. If only one could be proud of the result.’ In fact, the prose never went slack or ceased to catch hold of what it needed from the language as it changed. Always more expansive in admiration than detraction, his writing became positively spaced out for a moment at the Brighton Pavilion in 1965. Here he announces, surprisingly, that the ...”