“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... very week you sat upon my knee, twined your arms around me, caressed me with every mark of tenderness.’ It drifted on in a kind of idealised, erotic stalemate through the autumn and winter of 1820. The printed text speaks of kisses and caresses, of her sitting on his lap for hours on end, of the ‘liberties’ he took and the ...”

“... the seers of New Labour. Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century declaims the title of a manifesto by Mark Leonard, the party’s foreign policy wunderkind.2 ‘Imagine a world of peace, prosperity and democracy,’ he enjoins the reader. ‘What I am asking you to imagine is the “New European Century”.’ How will this entrancing prospect come ...”

“... uncovered a pattern of casual and widespread corruption among officers of all ranks. Sir Robert Mark, the Metropolitan Commissioner at the time, was determined to root out the ‘bad apples’. In February 1976 Mark announced that 82 officers had been dismissed following formal proceedings; a further 301 had left ...”

“... 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 ...”