“... Purity. Man Two is successful, manipulative, priapic, with an aridity to his heart: the rock star Richard Katz in Freedom, the ‘famous internet outlaw’ Andreas Wolf in Purity. What seemed in The Corrections like a generous sharing of perspective between characters who, being related, can’t avoid acknowledging that they see things differently – the ...”

“... it likely that their language would spread very far: the late 16th-century English lexicographer Richard Mulcaster observed that the ‘English tung … is of small reatch; it stretcheth no further than this Island of ours, naie not there ouer all’ (Gaelic, Welsh and Cornish were current on the Celtic fringes). Objections to English – even among the ...”

“... mentioned Alicia Machado, Miss Universe 1996, whom Trump had called ‘Miss Piggy’ for gaining weight at the time and ‘Miss Housekeeping’ because she is Latina. Trump cannot stand to be criticised by someone he considers a ‘loser’ and Machado was on television telling tales of Trump’s humiliation of her twenty years ago. Five days later, at three ...”

“... the Hunter’ symposium in Chicago in 1966, Marshall Sahlins drew on research from the likes of Richard B. Lee among the !Kung of the Kalahari to argue that hunter-gatherers enjoyed the ‘original affluent society’. Even in the most marginal environments, he said, hunter-gatherers weren’t engaged in a constant struggle for survival, but had a leisurely ...”

“... portrait composed of largely asserted values illuminating and convincing: disappointingly, in Richard Schacht’s introduction such an enquiry, which would indeed be timely, is not attempted. The last essay, ‘Wagner in Bayreuth’, is designed as an apotheosis of the Master on the occasion of the first Bayreuth Festival of July 1876. ‘In ...”

“... year in power, Gorbachev was presiding over a full-scale crash, whose causes are well described by Richard Ericson in an essay on the contemporary Russian economy in After the Soviet Union: Perestroika dictated the monetisation of transactions (that is, contractual buying and selling for a profit) without allowing the rouble to become real money or prices to ...”

“... output did better than that of most of the others, and this should surely have had more weight at the post-war take-off point than a growth rate lying further back.’ The argument about the negative effect of the war is disposed of (to Professor Pollard’s satisfaction, at least) by reference to the ‘great strength’ acquired in ‘some of the ...”

“... downright good a story … Too oily.’ ‘I was only thinking last night,’ she wrote in 1921 to Richard Murry, ‘people have hardly begun to write yet – now I mean prose … Aren’t they still cutting up sections rather than tackling the whole of a mind? … With all that one knows how much does one not know? … The unknown is far, far greater than the ...”

“... float exactly three floors above Equal (2015), four great stacks of two steel blocks each by Richard Serra (for obvious reasons neither will be moved anytime soon).Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic at the New York Times, calls the new design ‘smart, surgical, sprawling and slightly soulless’. I would take ‘slightly soulless’ over ...”

“... hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.’ This is the wording of Richard Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit ...”

“... quite say the animals agreed too. But he does pronounce the perverse verdict that, by 1900, ‘the weight of medical progress had crushed anti-vivisection.’ The depth of his misunderstanding is exposed in his passing remark that the Victorian anti-vivisection campaign was ‘perhaps the last major controversy in which lay people pretended to the competence ...”

“... thought, and you’d best buy the book to learn about it. Whether the link can bear much causal weight is another question. The subtitle of Tehila Sasson’s The Solidarity Economy: Non-Profits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire reflects today’s titling conventions. The subject is not in fact all non-profit organisations but rather the ...”

“... I was awake; I was eating more than usual but within three weeks had lost a stone and a half in weight, and couldn’t put it back on for more than a year. Later I developed blurred vision in my right eye, tinnitus in my right ear and recurrent insomnia. More frightening than any of this was the fact that I found it very difficult to concentrate: when I ...”

“... contemporary biographer’ as engaged in a life-and-death struggle – ‘forced, by the mere dead weight of paper, by the mountains of letters and journals and newspapers, to melt his materials or be smothered by them’. By the time the second volume was published in 1962, the reader, too, was potentially imperilled: ‘My task,’ Edel wrote, ‘has been ...”

“... swans. Women give birth on the stairs. A particular form of lovemaking, the man pressing his weight to the woman’s unresponsive back, recalls the executed youth hauled from the pit. (A long-haired sacrificial male god straight out of The Ballad of Reading Gaol.) Each element is made to vibrate against its contrary. Binding’s narratives, carefully ...”