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“... biggest of its kind in the city, was as creepy as its owner. With a stone satyr over the fifteen-foot front door and forty rooms over seven floors, the decor was of the Gothic Quagmire school: according to the FBI agents who raided it at the beginning of July, it contains among other weirdnesses a photo-montage of Epstein standing in a prison surrounded by ...”

“... incompetence and perpetual failure. As calamity succeeded calamity, culminating in the outbreak of foot and mouth, any even moderately effective opposition would have been poised for electoral victory. Yet by then the Conservative Party had been painstakingly and skilfully positioned to repel any voters who had been disappointed or disillusioned by the poor ...”

“... and heightens the fabular effect.* Two boys, best friends, one orphaned, set off on foot across the Caucasus with a bag and a Quran and a comb. Their names are Faroukh and Khalib. ‘It was the time of Saint Francis …’ It turns out that what Howe is describing is an Uzbek film called Man Follows Birds. Its director, Ali Khamraev, also made a ...”

“... examined, and examination invariably reveals a problem: the insufficiency of saying ‘he put one foot in front of the other,’ for example (when one foot is also put to the side of the other), or the paradox that walking down a ramp requires upward motion (the raising of one’s feet). If the laws of motion, gravity and ...”

“... is too easy.24 October. In an interview for the Observer this morning Robert McCrum congratulates Michael Frayn on being more of a free spirit than others of his generation, ‘Michael Winner and Alan Bennett being prisoners of their own celebrity’.Prisoners possibly but I hope we’re not in the same cell.14 ...”

“... in the Sligo area, where he lives. With writers such as Eugene McCabe, Tom McIntyre and Michael Harding he shares a commitment to local territories of the imagination and their distinct idioms, giving us access to a set of rich dialects and views of the world, on the one hand, and, on the other, setting up a healthy opposition to the Dublin/London ...”

“... in a Sunday newspaper in two days’ time. How can I not be manic? The next day I met the poet Michael Horowitz in the local health-food shop. The last time I bumped into him, in the same place a few months before, I was about to deliver my completed manuscript. Today, I asked him to my launch party. ‘Maybe I could review your book,’ he said. ‘That ...”

“... he ever completely forgets about us.’ Always, always, ever, in this eloquent translation by Michael Hofmann. She knows how it is with fathers: Sometimes my father loves us, and sometimes he doesn’t. When he doesn’t, we can’t do anything about it, my mother and me . . . Any steps we might take only have the effect of delaying even more the time ...”

“... he settled in London again, yet apart from describing how he nearly drowned in the Thames, at the foot of Westminster Bridge while larking in the watermen’s wherries, he says little about the city. Equiano’s story is extraordinary, yet it hardly tells us how its author ‘imagined’ London. Another former slave, Ignatius Sancho, wrote ‘the most ...”

“... was accompanied by a widespread fascination with ‘Gypsies’ in popular culture. Klaus-Michael Bogdal, a professor of German literature at the University of Bielefeld at the time of the riots, was struck by the contradiction. In the early 1990s, Germans were taking up flamenco lessons. The French-Gitano band Gipsy Kings was hitting the top of the ...”

“... ad, Mamallapuram was probably the greatest seaport in India. On the monsoon winds, great ninety-foot long, three hundred-ton, lash-lugged vessels carried Indian textiles, steel swords and brass buddhas to the furthest corners of south-east Asia – Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia – bringing back on the north-easterly monsoon ...”

“... and a voice. The first reading took place at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Michael McClure who also read that night along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen Allen in a few weeks and I had not heard Howl – it was new to me. Allen ...”

“... has another explanation, however. It was just a ‘taboo’, he writes (quoting the historian Michael Howard), like ‘intra-marital sex’. Everyone knew it went on, and was ‘quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions about it’ was ‘regarded as extremely bad form’. But that was not so, certainly at the start, and in ...”

“... he planned himself. For months at a time he rode the railways, traversed frozen rivers on foot and holed up in grim hotels. He crossed the Mississippi, the Appalachians and the Atlantic, by steamer to Liverpool. Lancashire became the heartland of his celebrity.Lyceums dictated not just Emerson’s topics ...”

“... place in Vonnegut’s fiction. No reader forgets the brainwashed Use of The Sirens of Titan, foot-soldier in the army of Mars and directed to strangle his best buddy on the parade-ground by a radio receiver in his skull – and there are many other figures in the novels who act under external control in a frightening way, against the grain of their ...”