“... squeezing pimples or playing conkers: Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmeralda, more or less on a whim. That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend ...”

“... The scene of the novel appears to be based on the novelist’s own house and estate on the coast north of Boston. Hint by hint we discover that the date is 2020, after a brief and ruinous Sino-American nuclear war. Mexico has recaptured Texas and southern California; the country is underpopulated and normal services have broken down; there is only local ...”

“... of a future conversion. Freud, indeed, was depressed by the cheerful reception of his ideas in North America because it proved that Americans had underestimated them, failing to see how disruptive they really were of all moral and social certainties. The stubborn Cartesians of France, on the other hand, unwilling to have their trust in the dignity and ...”

“... respect of professional critics, who are favoured: V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, David Storey, Paul Scott, Iris Murdoch, for instance. Beyond that it isn’t easy to see much significance in the list – perhaps there’s a nostalgia for the old Empire (Scott, J.G. Farrell, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, plus Nadine Gordimer, Naipaul, and P.H. Newby on ...”

“... he launched his new journal, the Banker, in 1926, and recruited to it such financial experts as Paul Einzig. Two years later, he persuaded Eyre and Spottis-woode to purchase a newspaper group that included the Economist, the Investors Chronicle and the Financial News as well. Long before his 30th year, he was established as a wealthy and successful ...”

“... the 1990s persuaded many politicians, liberals like Madeleine Albright no less than neo-cons like Paul Wolfowitz, that force works. As a consequence, when after 9/11 Bush committed the US to an open-ended ‘global war’, few dissented. Most Americans concluded that war offered just the ticket. Recent developments, including the fiasco of Iraq, have yet to ...”

“... by the idea that no-man’s-land was itself a kind of monstrous ornamental garden, possessed, as Paul Nash noted, of a weird beauty. Out of the ruins, a ruderal flora began to assert itself. ‘It is amazingly beautiful,’ Nash wrote. ‘The mud is dried to a pinky colour and upon the parapet, and through sandbags even, the green grass pushes up and waves ...”

“... various peoples who came to them. He heard about the most famous of these visitors, a man from the north-western extremity of the world: ‘Li Madou was sent by the rulers of Macau to spy on the imperial court, which has caused recent consideration being given to clearing Macau out. There is a temple in Macau, in which Li Madou was once a monk.’ Li Madou was ...”

“... de Prat de Lamartine was born in 1790 to aristocratic parents in Mâcon in Burgundy, fifty miles north of Lyon. An only son with five younger sisters, he was a bright, restless adolescent, running away from one school and fathering a child by a servant at the Jesuit college he went to next. He was often intensely bored and discovered early that ...”

“... Postmodern elders such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Paul Metcalf, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of these writers – however ...”

“... women prophets and seers. In this movement charisma certainly took precedence over authority. In North Africa, this conflict was intensified by questions about who had the power to forgive sins. The clergy increasingly claimed this as an exclusive clerical prerogative, but it was widely believed that prospective martyrs, suffering for the faith, could remit ...”

“... She was part kangaroo and part prizefighter. A woman made of rubber, a female Tarzan,’ wrote Paul Colin, who sketched her for La Revue nègre. Baker’s notorious horizontal movements were propelling her to the top of the world. Hers was the American dream, the assimilationist success story that (as Tylor Stovall argues in Paris Noir: African Americans ...”

“... who had been taken captive. Some German troops were seasoned veterans of the Eastern Front or the North Africa campaign, but others were young and inexperienced recruits. D-Day was the first time that Private Franz Rachmann had handled a machine gun outside of training: ‘I shoot, I shoot! For each American I see fall, there came ten hundred other ...”

“... of industry, the role of the unions, immigration, education, the economic and cultural gap between North and South. Several columnists (on both sides of the political divide) attributed Britain’s recent sporting success to Thatcher’s influence, and the culture of money-oriented competitive individualism that characterised her time in office. The London ...”

“... the election.*On an unannounced visit to the Korean demilitarised zone, including a few steps into North Korean territory itself with Kim Jong-un, the president brings along one of his favourite Fox News hosts, Tucker Carlson, as well as Ivanka. Carlson says of North Korea: ‘It’s a disgusting place, obviously. So ...”