“... with a stronger sense of pleasurable exchange than of fundamental wealth production with its power of ultimate determination – not economic reality but fiduciary notes. Paper money may suggest a completed transition from Marxist materialism to a Structuralist sovereignty of signs, but it is not so. Paper money is still money. Rather Greenblatt emerges ...”

“... Africa ceased to be a country where races were segregated by law. Yet no one in a position of power was called to account for the relegation of millions of South Africans to derelict Bantustans, the forcible removal of hundreds of thousands of non-white urban dwellers to shanty towns and rural areas, the coercive discrimination in every aspect of public ...”

“... that the unemployment rate now stands at its highest since 1949, the year the Communist Party took power. The downturn could prove the first real threat to the regime since the 1989 Tiananmen protests. It challenges the wisdom of Beijing’s economic model, and threatens to break the implicit bargain between China’s middle classes and its rulers, whereby the ...”

“... to pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-aesthetes, such as she was and is, because it has great gossipy power and can draw on history and mythology and concepts like blood and gold. It can seem to explain a lot. And it can form a bond between upper-crust types and the plebeians, a bond of sturdy race and nation against the clever and the tricky and the ‘hard to ...”

“... because ‘sperm for him was an emission of cerebral matter and as it were a waste of creative power.’ This theory, shared with Balzac, that ‘you can’t be more than one kind of athlete at a time’, is surely undermined by Olivier’s later sexual prowess – the result of a few sympathetic, extra-marital affairs which cured his tendency to premature ...”

“... of his narrator, his own version of the surreal everydayness of American life. In the Crowds and Power restaurant, people of various races tell each other jokes. Here, Max courts Lily; he makes friends with Lincoln and his greyhound, Cobb; they all become pals, and as Lily’s confidence in Max grows, the two take off for a holiday to France after, of ...”

“... them, not always accurately, for alleged alliances with the Tories.) As the results came in, Jonathan Bartley, the co-leader of the English Greens, dashed across the country to cheer his party’s achievements; Keir Starmer locked himself in his reshuffle bunker. Labour has developed a singular inability to appreciate what it gets right. The enthusiasm ...”

“... even those that are called experimental. Usually in such books – in B.S. Johnson, say, or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) – the messing around with words is designed to be expressive: this page is split in half because the character is in two minds; this page is fragmented because the character cannot hear. The ...”

“... e lo mio di fuori lo dimostra in alcuna nuova sembianza’; ‘[this thought hath such lordly power] that my heart (that is, my inner man) trembles, and my outward man shows it by taking on a new semblance.’ (The italics are mine; the translation is Katharine Hillard’s 1889 version.) The people whom Dante encounters are seen with their inner selves on ...”

“... open.’ The facts themselves, undressed, intoxicate her; ordinary things turn out to have strange power to move us, banality itself is mysterious, accumulations of detail take flight into commentary and insight. Anita Brookner is more like Bowen than Munro. ‘One Sunday, when an iron cold and stillness had settled over London, when the false early spring was ...”

“... of the British edition, Colm Tóibín calls it ‘a tour de force … a novel of immense power and scope, reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. Tóibín is also the novel’s UK publisher, under the Tuskar Rock imprint, which may have something to do with it, but ...”

“... offered his list of the attributes that might make a great philosopher. He looked for intellectual power and depth; a grasp of the sciences; a sense of the political, and of human destructiveness as well as creativity; range and imagination; unwillingness to settle for the superficially reassuring; and – if really lucky – the gifts of a great writer. ‘If ...”

“... and dowdy woman who gobbled her food’, and seemingly reliable stories attest to the tyrannical power she exerted over Kipling. One has her interrupting his after-dinner conversations with ‘Rud, it is time you went to bed,’ which he obeyed meekly. Later she would threaten to throw herself out of the window if he didn’t do as she wanted. But one can ...”

“... to Bishop Berkeley and W.B. Yeats, there is such a robust Irish faith in the imagination’s power to summon new worlds into existence. Philosophically, this suspicion of realism went hand in hand with a rejection of rationalism and materialism. If there is such an entity as the Irish mind, it is of a strongly idealist bent. Realism was in any case never ...”

“... of crushing banality: ‘The 17th century was a most exciting time, with its shifts in political power, and with its rise and fall of kings, there was, predictably enough, a rise and fall in the fortunes of many of the subjects.’ Again: ‘While the emerging middle class was in general looking more to reading as a source of information, enlightenment and ...”