“... most boring village in the world and Marxism can only go so far’. Vargas Llosa, then, may have been rewarded for agreeing to visit at all. But Aguirre and Buynova suggest another reason. ‘Loyal’ communist writers were often not treated particularly well, since their commitment to the cause was taken for granted. But Soviet literary ...”

“... an extra dictionary; we’d be foolish to raise our own and not join them; especially since they may become President one ...”

“... city. The London plane tree by my window hangs its green leatherette sleeves, exhausted by a hard May. My varsity jacket. The sky between leaves is the brightest thing in nature, Virginia Woolf told the inquiring Rupert Brooke. Whatever. Laisser-faire I can really only feign disapproval of my youngest dibbling his semolina’d fingers in the satiny lining of ...”

“... With yellow nettle-pollen and the first               thorn’s confetti Crushed the May bridegroom’s Head into her flood. She bore him fresh splendour Of eel-wreaths and a glut of white peal. Where is she now? A fairy Drowned in the radio-active Irish Sea. Blood-donor To the South-West Water Authority. Her womb’s been requisitioned. Now ...”

“... Love works in a mysterious way, as you would say. ‘Anyway,’ she ends, ‘it’s a fine auto. May look a wreck but it sure goes. It’ll get you all the way back to lil ol ...”

“... nudity draws out the peeping fruit of the lemon tree. Perhaps its light cologne is so wooing, she may deliquesce before flames take her.                                      Item 3: La Surprise. A Watteau recovered after two hundred years is possibly retardant. Tuning his guitar, the musician observes two lovers; they are ...”

“... to his exquisite lip. ‘No need to panic, folks. Our friend is but the first in a series that may well turn out to be infinite, if past experience is any indicator.’ The clock is running over, and an octopus wears my wallet ...”

“... Alert also on the subway and don’t feign Ignorance because, though Franco is still dead, long may Franco ...”

“... shown they won’t for two maybe three generations, those maestros of exposition, and that may be what’s driven the poets to this bluff of severely impartial impudence. I was thinking this walking home in the dark, the too-early dark of November, shivering, towards my apartment on a promontory, fingers stiff hauling staples, wondering if it was the ...”

“... to be laid in a box of his own device. To this day, if you happen to pass that shadowy glade you may see a ghostly rider riding a ghostly mare. You lit a cigarette. And as for the princess? I said. She married an English prince and got beheaded, you ...”

“... Dressing up in secret clothes at home – batiks and silks, caftans, sarongs – is all that you may need. If not, cuisine comes next: Asian takeaway in confidential brown paper bags. Only when ready come out in public: sitting at roadside stalls proudly becoming what you eat, stir-fry and rice, and more rice, in small civilised portions. Now you must use ...”

“... his factory has poisoned everything are as beautiful as Brueghel. I keep my shop, in order that I may sell everything there, empty but I leave the light on. Everything might spill. Do you know that in the deepest part of the sea everything goes transparent? asks my husband’s friend Corrado and I say Do you know how afraid I am? Everything requires ...”

“... that gave the room they sat in a lived-in feeling. She is so sorry for her own appearance, for it may seem as if she has been crying, or that she is about to, or that she is slightly off balance – not entirely upright – hair uncombed. The man wept when he at last left for good, as predicted, but we can see soon enough from the man’s expression, he is no ...”

“... Looking through the photographs I took in Tewkesbury in May, I found two pictures of Chuck Pavey and his floodwater hand. There’s Pavey, a 66-year-old retired electrician in a Manchester United hooded top, a wispy white pageboy haircut and dark glasses, standing by a wall on the bank of the River Avon. He’s holding his right hand horizontally in the air, about thirty centimetres above the top of the wall, which comes up to his waist ...”

“... the epistemic credentials of psychoanalysis, I take its explanatory power to be self-evident. You may not wish to commit yourself ontologically to some thing called the ‘unconscious’, and you may reasonably object to many of the details of the orthodox Freudian picture. (For example, the idea of penis envy, as Simone de ...”