“... works of art, Adorno maintained in Minima Moralia, are inevitably at once refused and demanded by them. That they may simply be incongruous he disregarded. Cases where parallels are as close as those between Proust and Powell lend ‘the compulsion to evaluate’ he thought so generally inescapable a particular ...”

“... On 28 November 1988, Paul Ingram, a police officer, was arrested by colleagues in his office in Olympia, Washington State. His daughters, Ericka and Julie, had accused him of sexual molestation. Ingram made no attempt to deny the charges. He couldn’t remember doing anything, but he said: ‘My girls know me. They wouldn’t lie about something like this ...”

“... so in the shadow of the Holocaust. Annual numbers of executions declined steadily after 1945 and by the early 1960s were barely a fifth of what they had been before the war. In 1965 – the year Britain abolished the death penalty – there were seven, compared, for example, to almost two hundred a year during the 1930s. There were two in 1966; one the year ...”

“... last while I have carried my heart in my boots. For a minute or two I actually imagined I could be responsible for the spread of foot and mouth disease across Britain. On my first acquaintance with the hill farmers of the Lake District, on a plot high above Keswick, I had a view of the countryside for tens of miles. I thought of the fields that had passed ...”

“... parades and pompom-wielding cheerleaders failed to greet the news that the UK economy grew by 0.1 per cent in the quarter-year to December. That’s as it should be, because this is as fragile as a recovery can possibly be, after six quarters of economic contraction. This is ...”

“... Head (1967), to only moderate acclaim. (None of them has been reprinted.) ‘It’ was going to be a novel dealing with the Irish War of Independence of 1919-21, which his Irish Protestant mother had childhood memories of, and which he was reading up on in a public library on 53rd Street, ‘scarcely adding to my feeble conception of how the thing should ...”

“... sales and advertising. Both of these have for years been under severe pressure. The story told by circulation figures is so obvious that it’s difficult to find anything interesting to point out about it. A recent OECD report, The Evolution of News and the Internet, makes the picture clear.* Between 2004 and 2009, the US newspaper industry lost 34 per ...”

“... And it comes out as ‘3 street cats humped’. Translation is clearly too important a task to be left to machines. But what sort of human should it be given to? Imagine that you are about to read a great French novel for the first time, and can only do so in your native English. The book itself is more than 150 years ...”

“... for posthumous publication, to show that she could wait out her own ego. Anyone else is likely to be seen as settling a score rather than diagnosing the ills of the literary marketplace. Edward St Aubyn, whose new novel, Lost for Words, is a satirical farce about the machinations behind a famous literary prize, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006 ...”

“... for sure who did what in the early morning of 21 August. He cited a list of what appeared to be hard-won evidence of Assad’s culpability: ‘In the days leading up to August 21st, we know that Assad’s chemical weapons personnel prepared for an attack near an area where they mix sarin gas. They distributed gas masks to their troops. Then they fired ...”

“... like a flannelette nightie. Did that give licence to the next day’s BBC Book Programme, opened by Robert Robinson on the proposition that ‘the judges made the wrong choice’? A ‘favourite aunt’, ‘a jam-making grandmother’, ‘Pooterish’, ‘distrait’: this is the sort of thing people wrote about the figure Fitzgerald presented, finding a ...”

“... her past. All she had now, penniless and homeless, was for me to marry well somehow. Life lifted by my excellent wedding, she as a much loved mother-in-law. Into literary life? I don’t think that was what she had in mind. It was respectability, swagged curtains and martinis. But all she had was her frizzy-haired daughter with her nose stuck in a book. It ...”

“... in America was a tragic necessity. No one can deny the legitimacy or urgency of the need felt by women and minorities to have equality on their own terms, to reject the assumption that full participation in society required acceptance of the norms set by straight white males. Yet even as the public sphere grew more ...”

“... on the road between Memphis and Hollywood, desert plains all around, his bloodstream torqued by a tinnital static of prescription ups and downs, Elvis Presley finally broke down. He poured out his troubles to Larry Geller, celebrity hair stylist and, lately, something of a spirit guide for Elvis. Geller had given him a mind-expanding reading list of what ...”

“... Whatever it takes​ .’ These words, spoken by the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, to a crowd of investors in the City of London on 26 July 2012, have come to represent the symbolic end to the acute phase of the global financial crisis. In the political sphere, by contrast, where words are supposed to be everything, we have not yet been able to draw the line ...”