“... it’s being republished now with the open aim of reaching the sizeable audience that resurrected John Williams’s Stoner and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road. All three books share an interest in sad marriages and a certain amount of diffuse self-pity, but strenuous Flaubertian realism as practised on a mid-20th-century American campus, provided in ...”

“... that is, of a violent, apparently purposeful activity that wasn’t in any real sense planned. I took that as a metaphor for a lot of things in the Soviet Union. Hatherley has a tough-minded approach to huge empty spaces, although he acknowledges that crossing them can be daunting. He views my bête noire, the 1960s-modern Kalinin Prospekt, with relative ...”

“... has to be tested not simply against the views of Assange’s lawyers and helpmates, but those of John Bellinger, for example, a former legal counsel for the State Department, who told AP television news in 2010 that bringing charges against Assange while he was still in the UK would put a loyal ally on the spot by generating a rival extradition ...”

“... of Abyssinia. He enjoyed the physical challenges posed by the conflict: much of the fighting took place at high altitudes, in temperatures that reached 140° F. Many foreign correspondents were confined to Addis Ababa, but Matthews travelled with the Italian army, and was on hand to witness the battle in Ende Gorge in November 1935, when the Abyssinians ...”

“... of things – but also to the ‘books I loved best . . . the ones that started in this world and took you to another’. He credits E. Nesbit with inventing the ‘mixing of the worlds’ in The Story of the Amulet (1906), the third of her novels about Cyril (who for some unaccountable reason Spufford thinks is called Hugh), Anthea, Robert and Jane and their ...”

“... the rule of law, was Alfredo Stroessner’s regime in Paraguay in the 1960s and 1970s, which took the logic of the state of exception to an absurd, still unsurpassed extreme. Under Stroessner, Paraguay was – with regard to its Constitutional order – a ‘normal’ parliamentary democracy with all freedoms guaranteed; however, since, as Stroessner ...”

“... large figure paintings (including Golgotha, a shtetl crucifixion, with the figures of Mary and St John based on his parents), one enthusiastic critic said it was ‘as if by mistake, the works of a child, truly fresh, “barbaric” and fantastic, had landed there.’ When his work was shown in Berlin two years later the response was even more ...”

“... Why must we exist in perpetual uncertainty (only ended by death) as to whether we are well or ill? John Donne speaks of illness as an invader, which sets up a kingdom and conceals ‘secrets of State, by which it will proceed, and not be bound to declare them’. So profound are the effects of the belief that we are ill that hypochondria must be seen as a ...”

“... said of his meal with Giscard, ‘a myth hunter … must hunt everywhere.’ That lunch, which took place in a flat in the Marais on 25 February 1980, with Lang doing the cooking, apparently went quite well. But then Barthes, en route back to his office, walked into the path of a laundry van, which left him unconscious and bleeding from the nose. He ...”

“... is following Gramsci’s example within one’s own society.’ In 2006, again in the LRB, he took the same attitude towards Marx, suggesting that Marx and Engels’s Rhineland origins was the key to their interpretation of capitalism’s development: Marxism was ‘a Rhineland-based diversion of global history, mistaken for the mainstream during a ...”

“... crisis, the corporation had to sell in order to keep building – and, once Thatcher’s policies took hold, at a price well below market rates. Renters, unsurprisingly, knew a good deal when they saw it; very quickly, the balance between owners and renters turned around. In 1979, 41 per cent of houses in Milton Keynes were owner-occupied; four years later ...”

“... directly at Mrs Touchet. Not a nice smile. A sharp smile, with a threat in it. Then bent down, took the second pail, and walked off towards the pantry, past all the kitchen drawers so full of sharp and threatening things.Such spiky delights. The passage follows a description of a group of servant children – ‘he’ is a young Black servant – taking ...”

“... in some way that might be free from (and free them from) the taint of empire. Oxfam in particular took advantage of a new culture of affluence and of the enthusiasm of (mostly female) volunteers to open charity shops on high streets – shops that could cater to economically diverse customers while also funnelling support to Oxfam’s overseas ...”

“... talking seriously to their US counterparts, including Cold War scholars such as Melvyn Leffler and John Gaddis. Radchenko, more than twenty years younger and so essentially post-Soviet, arrived in the US as an exchange student (improbably, from the island of Sakhalin in the Pacific), wrote a PhD on Sino-Soviet relations under the supervision of Odd Arne Westad ...”

“... their slaves, their excesses of despotism. At the same time even a light-hearted impresario like John Rich was aiming at targets closer to home, as Bridget Orr explains in an essay on the Oriental theatre. But it was the example of Scheherazade that the writers who flocked to ventriloquise Oriental tale-tellers took to ...”