“... provoked by the debris, odour and viscid substances did not diminish. Indeed, it strengthened. It took shape as a common perception of the phone box as phobic object or site. Penelope Gilliatt’s plague novel, One by One (1965), begins with an abortive call from a public booth so hot that the caller’s hand leaves a mark on the receiver ‘as though he were ...”

“... in his dispassionate intelligence and arabesques of introspection suggests Proust,’ John Updike wrote in the New Yorker, while the New York Times Book Review announced that ‘a new star has risen in the East.’ Since then, Pamuk has been compared to Joyce and Musil, Kafka and Calvino, and almost never – a further compliment – to the ...”

“... what … We were more like two streams coming together to make a third.’ The diamond miner took a less sentimental view of the collaboration. ‘We’re really not of the same dimension,’ he complained in his diaries. ‘I’m sort of an inveterate autodidact, a do-it-yourself guy, a sort of Jules Verne.’ Guattari resented ‘being strapped onto ...”

“... He sieved biographies, letters and accounts of those he considered great men – whether John Adams or Confucius – to produce poems with distinct overtones of hero-worship. In politics this tendency led to his admiration for Mussolini, and even to that view of Hitler as ‘a Saint’. While caged in Pisa in the closing days of the war, he set to ...”

“... the fighters they had trained. In the northern Syrian city of Hama, where the worst fighting took place, more than ten thousand were killed, and the city was reduced to rubble. In al-Suri’s bitter appraisal, the Muslim Brothers had shown their true colours. They had left the Combatant Vanguard to do most of the fighting, seeking instead to build ...”

“... is a bit of an old sod.’He is more critical of Donald Davie, saying in a sympathetic letter to John Montague apropos of a bad review that Davie is a ‘grotesquely shrunken silly imitator of Pound’, the receptacle of every other critic’s ‘dud cartridges & empty cases’, ‘the mincy mean know-all kind of little office snot’. His poetry is ‘all ...”

“... United States; and he fleshed out a new and noble American sense of mission before he reluctantly took his country into the European war. ‘We are provincials no longer,’ he famously declared in his second inaugural address in March 1917. Though still publicly opposed to American intervention in the war, he insisted that ‘our own fortunes as a nation are ...”

“... order), Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, the who what where why when remains unjournalistically unclear. It took DeWitt some time to reply, but when she did, the pair of them began an email correspondence. They are not, on the surface, compatible: he is a tabloid fixer and party animal, an imbiber and ingester; she is a solitary intellectual, weaving quietly at her ...”

“... economic and social policies which were explosively incompatible and which eventually did for John Major’s Government, and a reckless ‘re-engineering’ of the country’s social structure which ultimately went disastrously wrong for the Tories. She brought into being a middle class which, it turns out, has no overriding loyalty to the Conservative ...”

“... 1970s, co-operation turned into an intense struggle over diminishing resources. As the insurgency took root among the prospering peasant tribes of Darfur, the government trained and armed the poorer nomads and formed a militia – the Janjawiid – that became the vanguard of the unfolding counter-insurgency. The worst violence came from the Janjawiid, but ...”

“... of this cusp moment in Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany, of how or why Hütter and Schneider took their new pan-European direction. There’s a lot of boilerplate about starting from scratch and looking for a new identity, but few details of Sisyphean slog or Eureka! moments in among the shiny new electronic gear. Even a Kraftwerk sceptic like myself ...”

“... in the dark. The rubies move: they are better, they are beetles.When he entered the university it took Martin a long time to decide on a field of study. There were so many, and all were fascinating. He procrastinated on their outskirts, finding everywhere the same magical spring of vital elixir. He was excited by the viaduct suspended over an alpine ...”

“... to bring about was unprecedented: ‘This claim is upside down. The dangerous change actually took place in the early 1990s, when American policymakers effectively decided to let the rest of the world make our trade policy.’ This ‘crazy experiment’ was itself unprecedented. Its catastrophic results led to Trump’s election, and one of his major ...”

“... London dispatched no less a figure than the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Harding. Within a month of his arrival in 1955, he told the cabinet with brutal candour that if self-determination was ruled out, ‘a regime of military government must be established and the country run indefinitely as a police state.’ He was as good as ...”

“... and discontents from Europe and North and South America – by the flame of Revolution.It took twenty-four hours to fly to Cuba from Europe in those days, the Iberia Viscount touching down on all the islands in the mid-Atlantic on the way. I had two volumes of the collected works of Thomas Balogh in my luggage, required reading for progressive Latin ...”