“... Rooms, doss-houses. Unionist or Liberal Clubs, cindery waste ground, mill chimneys, slums, fried-fish shops, public houses with red blinds, bethels in corrugated iron, good-class drapers’ and confectioners’ shops, a cynically devastated countryside, sooty dismal little towns, and still sootier grim fortress-like cities. Although ethical appraisal ...”

“... was to be aired only after ‘I’m gone’. It’s included in Indian Sun, published last year to mark his centenary.Robindra ‘Ravi’ Shankar​ was born in 1920 in the northern Indian city of Benares. His mother, Hemangini, was eleven when she was married to Shankar’s father, Shyam, who had aspirations to practise law. Shyam had only a limited tolerance ...”

“... calling about a patient, a Mr Midgley.’ Noiselessly Miss Tunstall added an exclamation mark to ‘This hooliganism must now STOP!’ and waited, her hands spread over the keys. ‘What is the patient’s name?’ ‘Midgley,’ said Midgley. ‘He came in this morning.’ ‘When was he admitted?’ ‘This morning.’ ‘Midgley.’ There was a ...”

“... when he did appear in Julius Caesar, Forrest played the less intellectual and more show-stopping Mark Antony, but he much preferred those Shakespearean roles which allowed him physically to dominate the stage for a large proportion of the play and then to finish on a spectacular death: roles like Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and, above ...”

“... there, as it never was here: consecrated in MoMA, justified by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. It was more obvious what, at any stage, was to be overcome and where attacks, when they came, were coming from. Thus Hilton Kramer, who counts as an arch-conservative, is identifiable as a solid mid-century Modernist; for him, things go off around ...”

“... In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or anally raped or has his or her feet eaten off by rats, the pain of this (I nearly wrote the discomfort) must transcend anything else that happens on the stage. A ...”

“... the social fabric continues to collapse. Acorn has just celebrated its fifth anniversary – ‘fried rabbit, baked potato … acorn bread and sweet potato pie’ – when it is invaded by militias with big crosses on their tabards and turned over to become a Christian concentration camp. ‘I wanted to … lie down on the floor in a tight knot around my ...”

“... most grateful. My hands were clammy from the touch of the science fantasists, there was a felt-tip mark on my cuff, and I was hungry. ‘By the way, I expect you have eaten,’ Mr Simister said. I sank down in my seat. I didn’t know why he should expect anything of the sort, but I made an instant decision in favour of starvation, rather than go to some ...”

“... Meanwhile, Making It would go down in legend and out of print, a sunken landmark of sorts. To mark​ the fiftieth anniversary of Making It, NYRB Classics has revived Podhoretz’s battle-scarred memoir with an innocuous new introduction by Terry Teachout, Commentary’s critic at large, who isn’t about to jeopardise his post by saying anything too ...”

“... his tendency to bluntness. His criticisms of Kenyatta’s development plans were often on the mark. He anticipated the catastrophes created by unregulated capital and proposed instead the melding of free market and communalism in land co-operatives. But accurate criticism was not the path to power. Barack found he could not play the fool to curry favour ...”

“... of his semen … appear on her skin, and though easily wiped away leave in his imagination a mark like an acid-burn on her shoulders, her throat, the small of her back; he has the vision of her entire slender fair flexible body being eventually covered with these invisible burns.’ If you were worried that somewhere in this sweeping tetralogy Rabbit ...”

“... to get some nosh?’ David asked after the reading. He was partial to bland food, but liked the fried onion blossom at a restaurant in town. He told me how glad he was the tour was over. The week before, he said, a reporter from Rolling Stone had followed him around, almost lived with him. But he didn’t think the article would be printed. ‘That was ...”

“... not say so. She was wondering if the casserole she had left in the oven would get too dry at Gas Mark 4. Perhaps 3 would have been better. Dry it may well have been but there was no need to have worried. The thieves took the oven and the casserole with it. The Ransomes lived in an Edwardian block of flats the colour of ox-blood not far from Regent’s ...”

“... On 6 October 1981, President Anwar al-Sadat attended a parade to mark the anniversary of the crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 war with Israel. It was also an occasion to display the American, British and French aircraft Egypt had recently acquired: symbols of its realignment with the West after more than two decades as a Soviet ally ...”

“... two-roomed brick house, wearing a blue T-shirt and shorts under a black cap, a Brahminical caste mark on his forehead. He had the serenity of a man at the end of his life. And, given the circumstances, he had not done too badly. I had spent much of that day on the road from Kathmandu to the Tarai, shuffling past long queues of Tata trucks from India, through ...”