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“... When Jonathan Lethem was born, in 1964, his mother had dropped out of college and was piercing ears with a pin and ice-cube in Greenwich Village, where she ran with a crowd of folksingers including Tuli Kupferberg, Dave Van Ronk and Phil Ochs. His father, in an early phase of his career as an artist, was painting basketball hoops, vices and stereopticons ...”

“... part from each other, we might have come in sight of those hills which skirt the road for so many miles, and thus continuing our journey ... I fancied that we should have seen so deeply into each others hearts, and been so fondly locked in each others arms, that we should have braved the worst and parted no more.’ ‘Under that tree,’ he continues, his ...”

“... inside offer views over the Pennines, Peak District and Snowdonia.’ They also offer views of miles of industrial, rather than post-industrial, satellites, which do not accord with the RGS’s ‘Discovering Britain’, an embarrassing programme of ‘Marmite landscapes’ and ‘tiny treasure hunts’. There are yet further views, equally outside the RGS ...”

“... was sitting in the Acropole Hotel, having failed to leave the country. Not Greece – she was 1500 miles from the shores of the Aegean in a dusty, impoverished tip of a city. The Acropole is a Greek family business in Khartoum. The proprietors and the picture on the hotel stationery are the only connections with Athens, both of them tenuous. Stranded in ...”

“... Rachel’s mother and stepfather in Carver, Mass., a small town of relatively modest means, fifty miles south of Boston. English people fresh to the United States are often shaken to find themselves in hyperreality. The landscape, so familiar in two dimensions from television, movies and print, suddenly, unsettlingly, takes on a third. From my own first ...”

“... USSR in 1922. It consisted of little more than a thin region around Minsk and was barely a hundred miles wide. A few years later, the Kremlin transferred Gomel, Mogilev and Vitebsk from Russian to Belarusian communist rule for what Wilson calls ‘instrumental reasons’. Stalin wanted to build Belarus up within the Soviet Union, partly to appeal to ethnic kin ...”

“... Amerindian and White Negro’. It is all a bit too much, but at least Mellers takes care, unlike Jonathan Cott in his expensive, over-reverential tome: one more coffee-table book. It may seem a bit Dylanesque (i.e. slightly cruel) but I finished Cott’s book without being able to remember what it had been about. Mellers has, at the very least, used his ...”

“... on their rucksacks as they criss-crossed Europe meeting up with pen pals and old army buddies. Jonathan Purkis, a self-described ‘vagabond sociologist’, sees hitchhiking as the inheritor of a long tradition celebrating self-sufficient travel, dating back to Lao Tzu’s aphorisms (the journey as more important than the destination) and medieval ...”

“... praise, is reverentially read by all. Borrow of the mighty stride – he could cover more than 30 miles a day and always counted on doing the last lap to the pub at six miles an hour – Borrow the mysterious, the adventurous, the polyglot, the pugilist, the dodgy lover has been thrown into an unregarded corner. Up in ...”

“... acte gratuit would be to give a man your cloak as well when he asks for your coat or to go two miles when he asks you to go one. The influence of existentialism is at its strongest in Terence’s first strictly literary critical book, Shakespeare and Society (1967). The Leavisite inflection is still there as Shakespeare is read in terms of the tensions ...”

“... Jonathan Franzen​ has been compared to 19th-century greats: to Tolstoy, to Dickens. In respect of his best and most successful book, The Corrections, the praise carries a false hint of the retrograde, of revival of old forms or subject matter. Published at the turn of the millennium, The Corrections is a work of its time, not for its topical themes of dementia, the medicated society or stock market chicanery but for its approach to family ...”

“... One​ of the inhabitants of Middle England, the title and the setting of Jonathan Coe’s last novel, part of a location that is also called ‘merrie’, ‘deep’ and ‘old’, thinks that she and others ‘might be living cheek-by-jowl in the same country, but they also lived in different universes’. The language in which these universes fail to communicate is politics, and one of the great insights of the novel is that politics is so often just that: a language and not a topic ...”

“... In January 2010, Jonathan Katz was working in Haiti for the Associated Press, the only American news organisation with a permanent bureau there. Other foreign journalists lived there, and a few more flew in for elections and catastrophes, but for the most part Haiti coverage had become a casualty of slashed budgets at dying newspapers and magazines ...”

“... century. Now, adding another six hundred pages to the extant eight hundred-odd on Brenan’s life, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s biography demonstrates that there are many things which Brenan, although an extremely honest autobiographer, didn’t fully reveal about himself and others. Indeed, to have done so would have gone against his principles: as a ...”

“... at al-Hilla is instructive. Al-Hilla is a city of just over half a million people, about fifty miles south of Baghdad. Many of its residents are poor, living with their families and animals in areas of tightly packed mud-brick houses and dirt streets. On the morning of 31 March last year, the neighbourhood of Nadir, about half a mile south of the city’s ...”