“... and colours, and outlines, sharp or blurred, with which scabs, and bruises, and grazes, can mark the skin, nor was I content until I also had a mental list of the yet more formless stains that shame a child’s underclothing as the secretions of the body spread outwards, and I would try to commit them to memory even as, in the sanctuary of the ...”

“... his own words, a ‘visionary’ speech, and he wrote it all himself, in the study overlooking the Rose Garden at Chequers, a single draft composed with little hesitation and no agonising. While he wrote it, he picked up from the desk a silver and gold inkstand given to Chamberlain in 1937, with an inscription that reads: ‘To stand on the ancient ways, to ...”

“... the headline Man with Friend with Cancer ‘Going through a rough Time’: Three months ago, Mark Sennis received the news that everyone dreads: Ben Murphy, a friend and coworker with whom he ‘occasionally went out to lunch’, had been diagnosed with cancer. ‘You never think you’re going to be the one,’ Sennis said. ‘At first, I remember ...”

“... where you open with salutations like ‘Hello you no good wenchy slut’, drawn for some reason in rose-garden cursive. But some constraint – perhaps of politeness, perhaps of expectation – is broken in the stories and the memoir. Her real distinction, I came to believe as I read, is of sounding always exactly like herself, which is a better interpretation ...”

“... to view ourselves and our societies over the past thirty years or so. As the sociologist Nikolas Rose has detailed, the rise and cultural influence of the neurosciences since the early 1990s has brought about subtle but profound transformations in what we consider a human being to be. The psychology and psychoanalysis that originated in the late 19th century ...”

“... to the Roman villa beside the Evenlode stream. Looking down on the bushy mounds of earth which mark the site of a Roman-Briton’s country house, and with the boys of the village bathing and shouting in the stream beyond, we ate our lunch. It was a magnificent hot, sunny day with a heat haze over the beech and oak woods, the cornfields still freshly green ...”

“... Richardson points out, has several qualities, not a few of them nicked from Faulkner, that would mark Matthiessen’s more mature fiction: a lurid and exotic setting (Matthiessen had visited Jim Crow Georgia with a girlfriend he met in New York), characters’ voices rendered in vernacular dialect, the theme of racism and the use of racial slurs, conflicting ...”

“... have to sit in meetings that take all day and go nowhere. I don’t have to worry about how to mark a piece of work that has almost certainly been written by a machine. The price of this emancipation is having no say in the way the university goes about its business and a less well-padded income than I had in the past. It feels like a good bargain.That ...”

“... far as I can tell, from ‘Black to the Future’, an essay published in 1994 by a white critic, Mark Dery. ‘Why do so few African Americans write science fiction?’ is the question it asks, though the bulk of the essay consists of interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, Tricia Rose. The word is now much used when ...”

“... my brushstrokes without looking at me, his head averted. He was according me invisibility, as a mark of respect to another man’s wife. I was not sure that Ijaz accorded me this respect. Our situation was anomalous and ripe for misunderstanding: I had an afternoon caller. He probably thought that only the kind of woman who took a lot of risks with herself ...”

“... was no remedy for the disillusion that began building as growth slowed and unemployment rose, creating a sense of exclusion among young workers, and students living in overcrowded hostels. When the revolt exploded in 1968, it drew on a wealth of revolutionary precedent that student movements in other countries didn’t have at their disposal. But ...”

“... who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton Hill to Rose Street. In those days, a sort of café society still flourished in Edinburgh. You knew which set you’d find in which pub, and young Karl was introduced to the mighty poets of Milne’s Bar and the Abbotsford: Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig and Robert ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he holds a small scroll (a love poem?) while the other, resting between his thighs, toys with a rose. This is a Shakespeare fit to have his poems set as lieder. He is also celebrated as a central figure in German Kunst on the proscenium arch of the Latvian national opera house in Riga, once the city’s German-speaking theatre, where four portrait profiles ...”

“... he waited hiding behind his person ... and his quiet desperation, dammed up behind that façade, rose higher every day.’ Ulrich’s position has a close affinity with that of the narrator of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquietude, a strikingly complementary text to The Man without Qualities and written over a roughly similar period. At the beginning ...”