“... such a strategy might work? The answer was proudly displayed in a framed text that hung on the wall of their front office. I have never made the pilgrimage to see it and remain content to imagine it as reverently executed in poker-work, like an old-fashioned scriptural motto. Certainly it provided the inspiration for the efforts of all the artillery ...”

“... loved, likewise Trainspotting. Almost anything scatological had great appeal. He also enjoyed the Richard Yates books I shared with him. When I was ill at one point I read through all of Derek Raymond, whom I recommend to anyone with a stubborn bacterial infection. ‘Oh, yes,’ Thom said, ‘he’s wonderful, isn’t he.’ Sometimes we came on an author ...”

“... austerity accompanied by occupations of tax-dodging shops, and a homegrown version of Occupy Wall Street on the steps of St Paul’s. (The urban riots of August 2011 were related but distinct, originating as a response to a police killing.) Compared with the protests Vincent Bevins discusses in If We Burn, this British activism was low-level ...”

“... since these intellectual entrepreneurs were determined to get ahead of the game – was Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, published in 1994, which made the case that differences in IQ between racial groups should be factored into policy-making. But Slobodian shows that this was just the tip of a Mont Pelerin-sized ...”

“... unpatriotic act – that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.’ In an essay on Richard Wright, published in 1951, he wrote: And there is, I should think, no Negro living in America who has not felt briefly and for long periods, with anguish sharp or dull, in varying degrees or to varying effect, simple, naked and unanswerable hatred; who ...”

“... poetry. The title poem ‘The Visit’: They’ve let me walk with you As far as this high wall. The placid smiles Of our new friends, the old incurables, Pursue us lovingly. Their boyish, suntanned heads, Their ancient arms Outstretched, belong to you. Although your head still burns Your hands remember me. There is an echo of Yeats (impossible to ...”

“... till his arm ached, and then he flung him into a chair, gasping, cursing, and scarcely human. And Richard Chandos v. Boler, the Boche villain of Dornford Yates’s Cost Price:   ‘Look on your own face,’ I said; ‘for, by God, when you see it next, it won’t look the same.’   Then, as a man puts the weight, I put his face to the ...”

“... book his study most brings to mind, in the end, is not another anthropological work but Clockers, Richard Price’s best-selling novel about the Jersey City crack trade. In many ways, indeed, In Search of Respect out-does Clockers. Bourgois did not merely report on East Harlem, after all; he lived there with his wife and child for four years, researching the ...”

“... philistinism of local notables and the formality of the court. A generation later the 25-year-old Richard Strauss was hired, but like others before him felt blocked by petty bureaucrats and insufficiently supported (or recompensed) by his patron. After five years he went back to Munich. The wealthy cosmopolitan Count Harry Kessler moved to Weimar in the ...”

“... first initial and surname: six Wolfs, three Weills (not just Kurt), two Wollheims (neither of them Richard, who was born in England). Celebrated figures such as Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, who went to Turkey, are mentioned only very briefly. Exile was a great leveller – and also a dealer of death. Much of the 20th century has been commemorated in the ...”

“... gay) literary critic Michael Snediker, talking about the photograph of Moss, taken by Richard Avedon, to which he is ‘most attached’: ‘I like that she aestheticises noli me tangere. It’s not that she seems to be in a heroin stupor. It’s that she seems damaged from the outset, as though there’s nothing we (scopophilically or ...”

“... Martin Amis, his second novel, Fullalove (1995), is the memorable and often dazzling story of a ‘wall-shinning, nose-poking, leg-in-the-door’ tabloid hack, a ‘colour man’ sent to the scene of ‘the latest nail-bomb or child-snatch or brutal sex-death’ to colour up the basic story – to ‘give it a bit of ginger’. He soon starts to worry whether ...”

“... in a country house: The service stairs were next to the main stairs, separated only by a wall, but what a difference there was between them: the narrow back stairs, dangerously unrailed, under the bleak gleam of a skylight, each step worn down to a steep hollow, turned tightly in a deep grey shaft; whereas the great main sweep, a miracle of ...”

“... a revelation to Paolozzi when he discovered it in 1948; he soon passed it on to IG colleagues like Richard Hamilton (who produced an extraordinary exhibition on the topic in 1951). For Thompson biological forms are determined by forces both internal and external, such that what appears to be a deformation within a structure is often an adaptation to the ...”

“... virus from a graveyard in Alaska). Black tells of a barnacle-encrusted skull found on the harbour wall of a port in the West of Scotland, no doubt left there by a fisherman who’d trawled it up from the sea floor and couldn’t face the paperwork involved in telling the police. Forensic analysis drew a blank until the carbon dating results were in. ‘This ...”