“... early 1970s, when everyone else was dropping acid, I refrained – mainly out of fear that I would be the inevitable freak with no friends who would end up curled up for life in a psychotic ball, or else spattered in ribbony pieces, having flung myself through a plate-glass window. I also wanted to get perfect grades. No: the major dissipations this holiday ...”

“... of The Ambassadors is ‘achieved at the cost of “life”’. Wells had said that ‘life should be given the preference, and must not be whittled or distended for a pattern’s sake.’ To James this was heresy; in his own way he also strove to give life the preference. He wrote a great deal about ‘the art of ...”

“... former Labour MP and miners’ leader Ronnie Campbell, who was gravely ill. It was a private visit by one left-wing insubordinate to another, by a campaigner who tried to re-radicalise Labour to one of his most loyal supporters. I only found out about it when I was sitting in the front room of the Campbells’ house with his ...”

“... tellers’ floors began raining onto the empty vaults below, a note of satisfaction was sounded by bankers in the Arab world. Financial institutions sticking to the tenets of Islam, they announced, were largely immune from the debt crisis. Devout Muslims may lend and borrow under certain conditions; they can even buy and sell debt in the form of ...”

“... of desire elevated to the status of a ‘right’. This is partly the verbal flotsam thrown up by the market populism of the Thatch-Lab pact of the mid-1990s. But it also has to be seen as evidence of a deeper shift in the ways we conceive of our social relations. The emphasis on ‘aspiration’ is one symptom of the ...”

“... metallic taste in my mouth when I parked at the Sierra Club offices uptown, except that since the BP spill such incidents have been common. As of mid-July, the spill is supposed to be plugged at last, except that the plug is temporary at best, and the millions of gallons of oil are out there in the ocean, on the coast ...”

“... Broughty Ferry in the east of Dundee, with logs and potatoes and an old sideboard hand-decorated by my mother. The animal was killed by my great-uncle, Robin Meek, and a local huntsman, Belli, in the Nilgiri hills in southern India in 1931. Originally – that is, when I was a child – the leopard was in two parts, the ...”

“... the paying mid-section (levels 35-52) of the London Bridge intervention known as the Shard, by way of a 149 bus out of Haggerston. This on the day of a seasonal Underground strike that has to be explained to bemused knots of grounded tourists as they squeeze through a complexity of automated barriers, encumbered ...”

“... Rupert Brooke​ died of septicaemia caused by an infected mosquito bite, on his way to fight in Gallipoli in April 1915. It wasn’t a romantic or heroic death, but it proved easy enough to turn into legend: that he died in the Aegean and not a ditch in Northern France helped; so did his burial on the island of Skyros, where Achilles lived and Theseus was killed; so did the speed with which his death followed on the publication of his five war sonnets, his most famous and least typical poems, which had just been praised by the dean of St Paul’s for their ‘pure and elevated patriotism ...”

“... critic, memoirist and biographer James Atlas brought forth a Life of Saul Bellow that augured to be the literary event of the season, a crowning glory for author and subject. Bellow: A Biography was Atlas’s highly anticipated successor to his wunderkind biography of the brilliant, bedevilled Delmore Schwartz, whose combustible presence served as the ...”

“... classics the moment they were published: the 1940 novel Native Son and the 1945 memoir Black Boy. By ‘choosing exile’, as he put it, he hoped both to free himself from American racism and to put an ocean between himself and the Communist Party of the United States, in which he’d first come to prominence as a writer of proletarian fiction only to find ...”

“... of his Dutch economic adviser not to remove the statue of Raffles from Singapore harbour: it would be foolish to retire such a beacon for foreign capital.Singapore today occupies an exalted place in the neoliberal imagination. ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ was the slogan of the Brexiter elite, who promised a City of London ‘unleashed’ from European controls ...”

“... William Gaddis, who won the National Book Award with JR, might actually have felt short-changed by the accolade of the imprint, to judge by a riff in JR deploring the way ‘longer works of fiction [are] now dismissed as classics and … largely unread due to the effort involved in reading and turning any more than two ...”

“... So:​ the last London. It has to be said with a climbing inflection at the end. Every statement is provisional here. Nothing is fixed or grounded. Come back tomorrow and the British Museum will be an ice rink, a boutique hotel, a fashion hub. The familiar streets outside will have vanished into walls of curved glass and progressive holes in the ground ...”

“... Toryism.The chief priorities of Corbyn’s Labour Party were neatly captured in two speeches made by John McDonnell, his shadow chancellor and often the project’s most eloquent spokesman. In 2016 he declared that Labour members would ‘no longer have to whisper’ the word ‘socialism’: the party would no longer ...”