“... no appeal, the one ‘likeness’ guaranteed to show you looking the way you never want to look. Paul Fussell called it ‘the most egregious little modernism’, redolent of ‘the world of Prufrock and Joseph K and Malone’, and indeed every time my photo is scrutinised by a passport officer, it’s as if I’ve entered that same world of anxiety and ...”

“... MP and the owner of an Amsterdam pizzeria.Radoman wasn’t just a sailor. In the 2000s he became a foot soldier in the trade that shifts billions of dollars’ worth of cocaine from South America to Europe every year. Over the last two decades this business has increasingly come to be controlled by gangs from the Balkans, and is now dominated by ...”

“... in the role it allots to women, ‘chits of girls’ and ‘hussies’ must wait on her hand and foot, and only get grumbles for thanks. In a hard-pressed and resentful ending, the poet says (in literal translation) that she’ll do ‘anything just to keep this batty old woman quiet’. Carson makes his own feelings clear by rendering this, more ...”

“... far end of this group is presided over by Alexander McQueen, in a huge image blown up to fill a 12 foot archway. The designer most closely associated with the resurgence of British fashion in the last twenty years broods with cigarette and skull like a troubled Hamlet to Vivienne Westwood’s fairy godmother, both shot by Tim Walker. From this side of the ...”

“... smoke you will rise into air Then a grave you will have in the clouds There one lies unconfined Paul Celan wrote in ‘Todesfuge’. These dead can generally be reburied only symbolically. Ashes are gathered from Eastern Europe’s death camps and newly interred under gravestones. At Père Lachaise they lie near the Mur des Fédérés, where the last of the ...”

“... describing his psychological state when he was in St-Tropez in the summer of 1904 (working with Paul Signac), ‘a man driven daily to the brink of desperation by inner tension, insomnia and the paralysing demons of frustration and self-doubt’. The certainties of neo-Impressionism, of Signac’s systematic development of Seurat’s ...”

“... calls are from picketing engineers seeking updates about which intersections they should cross on foot …   Patel is both trying to get the limos to their destination and coaching the picketers on how best to interrupt that progress. No ant-logic there, then. Rather a perfect model of deeply confused co-operation. All the same, I’m sure the ant-world ...”

“... debt at a speed never before achieved, and have built up debts never before seen in peacetime. The foot is on the floor and the needle is in the red. There’s no choice except to slow down – but nobody knows quite how to do it, because it’s never been done before. Put all these things together, and the state we’re in doesn’t look peachy. The imminence ...”

“... those low pentagonal stools on the sloping rubberised side of which the customer placed his or her foot, over which Aunty’s head would be reverently bent about to unlace the shoe. Coyly she looks up. ‘Have I,’ she says in those exaggeratedly correct tones of which she was so proud and which marked her out as a professional woman, ‘Have I the pleasure ...”

“... along; my mother is still indignant. (‘I never liked her or her weird diet.’) Said PG was four-foot-ten and 90 pounds – a tiny, frail, somewhat eccentric Jewish-Canadian vegan with gluten allergies who wore rubberised Doc Martens and played the medieval viel. We once visited all the Cathar fortresses together. I miss her a lot sometimes – especially ...”

“... lore had Warhol moving into bed with his mother while his father slept upstairs with Paul and John [Warhol’s siblings],’ Gopnik writes. When Julia moved to New York to live with her son, people ‘thought she was stupid’, a friend said, ‘but she was brilliant beyond belief … and much smarter than Andy.’In high school, Warhol was not ...”

“... Yeltsin. The meetings went on like this for several days. We talked about Deconstruction, about Paul de Man, about ideological subversion and containment, about principles of selection and rejection, about the fortunes of systematic Marxist literary criticism, and so forth. There were some moments of illumination, but often the American editors seemed to be ...”

“... was a good little thing, she said, anxious to please. He polished her shoes and brought her little foot-stove in the morning, to warm her legs when she heaved out of bed. Simon was a heavy drinker, unpredictable and sometimes violent. His tuition seemed to consist in teaching the boy to sing Revolutionary songs and repeat coarse jokes about the three women ...”

“... group of international terrorism. Because now the terrorists, like other businessmen and corporate foot-soldiers, bond at white-water rafting sessions or convenient gymnasiums. For the moment, in the lethargy of future boasts and current frustrations, we join a straggle of flustered passengers carrying bags down a ditch between building sites. Red and white ...”

“... teach at the New School for Social Research in New York. In March 1941, he boarded the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle along with 350 other ‘undesirables’, among them Victor Serge, who described the ship as ‘a kind of floating concentration camp’. Lévi-Strauss found the ascetic Serge unapproachable, but while docked in Casablanca he struck up a lasting ...”