“... He’s invariably linked with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least ...”

“... in the 15 years she’s been writing novels. Her first, The Cast Iron Shore (1996), won the David Higham Prize for Fiction; her second, When I Lived in Modern Times (2000), won the Orange Prize over the shoo-in, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth; her third, Still Here (2002), was longlisted for the Booker Prize; her fourth, The Clothes on Their Backs ...”

“... of her look at all alike,’ Stephen Schiff wrote of Muriel Spark in 1993. ‘In one she may seem a sturdy English rose, in another a seductress staring down at her prey, in still another an intellectual prankster peeking wryly over her spectacles, and sometimes she looks merely square and oatmeal-faced, grinning wholesomely into too much ...”

“... and Ethiopia’ that was published in the collection A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman (edited by David Reynolds), and they also feature in Folsom’s excellent introduction to this facsimile edition of the first book publication of Democratic Vistas. Spurred into prose by Carlyle’s taunts and barbs, Whitman set himself the task of composing three essays ...”

“... Rogers, Ingrid Bergman and Mary Pickford joined a committee to welcome her to Hollywood, where David O. Selznick sponsored an evening in her honour during which the Los Angeles Philharmonic played ‘The Madame Chiang Kai-shek March’. (As she was travelling west, the inhabitants of one small town lined up to see her when her train stopped to take on ...”

“... start again, only to abandon this second attempt. A third attempt in 2000 gives way to a fourth in May 2002, which I put aside after three months and do not pick up again until October 2004, when my daughter returns from a trip to Madagascar with a little dictionary of Créole. In it I find the nursery rhyme which appears in the opening chapter: Waï, waï, mo ...”

“... Labour, had won comprehensively under a democratic franchise only five years before. Until 7 May the SNP’s best parliamentary performance had been in October 1974. The Conservative Party was the first of the major parties to lose its Scottish base. It won more than 50 per cent of the vote in Scotland in 1955, but its decay began as secularisation ...”

“... thank goodness. For the present, we’re more or less in trenches again – but movement orders may come at any moment. I’m writing this in an Observation Post in the outpost line on a comparatively peaceful and sunny morning. Love to Billie and the youngsters.All his life Lewis was a scribbler of verse, and the habit endured in France. He wrote a long ...”

“... recordings could have data stripped from them and still sound as good. The information theorist David Huffman had also demonstrated that sonic regularities – a violin string vibrating at a steady pitch, say – could be encoded in such a way that they took up minimal data, then subsequently decoded and expanded into audio information at playback. On the ...”

“... for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You don’t need a spatula to enjoy Elizabeth David.) There was an ash tree outside our house in Kentish Town: I know because I had to ask the council to lop away some of the upper growth as it came closer to the bedroom window. (The ancient tree in James’s story is uncomfortably close to the window of the ...”

“... from the proclamation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. ‘Frustrating though this may be,’ Porter argues, ‘confusion and complexity are generally a truer way of looking at things than certainty and simplicity.’ He proposes as a fanciful discipline that ‘we imperial historians agree to a moratorium on the “e”, “i”, and ...”

“... can say you are.’ As with the opposition, the toilet doors ‘bang increasingly frequently’. David Kirk, acting captain from the start of the tournament: ‘Remember, you’re the All Blacks. You carry with you the memory of the past. That’s a force.’ Andy Dalton, the nominated captain who failed to play a single match because of a training ...”

“... but no president of Palestine. ‘A society in crisis forges a new vocabulary for itself,’ David Grossman wrote in The Yellow Wind, ‘and gradually, a new language emerges whose words . . . no longer describe reality, but attempt, instead, to conceal it.’ This ‘new language’ was adopted voluntarily by the media, but if one needs an official ...”

“... the place whereon thou standest is holy ground’. But Ora Horn Prouser says that the command ‘may simply appear to be about holiness’ when, actually, it defines the nature of the relationship between God and the Israelites. Captives are kept barefoot, and David fled barefooted from his son Absalom. Subjugation and ...”

“... Mosul, Picot was unaware that Kitchener and Sykes were secretly planning to give it to him,’ David Fromkin wrote in A Peace to End All Peace (1989). ‘They wanted the French sphere of influence to be extended from the Mediterranean coast on the west all the way to the east so that it paralleled and adjoined Russian-held zones; the French zone was to ...”