“... trap – and in Ottessa Moshfegh’s fiction there are better or worse entrapments, but there is no not being trapped. The divorcée in her short story ‘Bettering Myself’, which won the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, keeps half her life – ‘clothes, books, unopened mail, ashtrays’ – trapped between the bed and the wall. The protagonist of her ...”

“... to display an admiration that he considered indecent in front of a foreign witness?Maigret had no hesitation in silently scoring himself a point.To be fair, in the restaurant car, Mr Pyke had marked one up in turn. A trivial matter. A faint pinch of the nostrils at the arrival of the bacon and eggs, incontestably inferior to those of his own country.There ...”

“... licence. And surely, how can one speak of the Irish as a ‘great people’? I see no greatness, nor any kind of superiority in them, & they seem to me an inferior and 3rd rate race, whose virtues are of the cheapest and shallowest order, while their vices are peculiarly cowardly and ferocious. They have been abominably treated in the past ...”

“... seemed to render the safe, deliberate pace of the Madisonian formula obsolete. Yet daring or no, the great inertial system of the Constitution – of checks and balances, of party government and bureaucracy, of judicial obstructionism and Federal decentralisation – continued to impede the efforts of Wilson to make the world safe for democracy, and of ...”

“... William Ansah Sessarakoo’s​ father, John Corrantee of Annamaboe, on the Gold Coast, was a member of the Fante ruling family and a prominent merchant, well known in the interior and among European slave traders. In order to strengthen ties with his European business partners, and to give his heirs an advantage over their countrymen, Corrantee sent one of his sons to be educated in France and another – Sessarakoo – in England ...”

“... come hell or high water, let our distinctive British identity be lost in a federal Europe.’ John Major’s ringing assurance to last year’s Conservative Party Conference is part of a long tradition whereby Britishness has been defined primarily by reference to a real or an imaginary Other. Understandably so, since defining this entity in its own terms ...”

“... I noted down the names of Paul Ives, Graham Paine (‘who lost his life by drowning’), Clifford John Dunn, Ronald Alexander Pinn and John Hill, all of whom were born in the 1960s, as I was, and died early.The practice of using dead children’s identities began in the Metropolitan Police Force in the 1960s. Until very ...”

“... a sturdy wooden seat placed within the hull so that it is sheltered as if by an arbour. There is no water in sight except a definitely non-navigable stream. Anyone who sits here has no choice but to stare across the meadows, usually full of cows, towards a large pile of reddish, crumbling masonry. The inscription on the ...”

“... firecracker, because I have to identify myself with everyone in it, including the corpses, pal. John Berryman, Dream Song When we first meet him in The Sportswriter (1986), Frank Bascombe is 38 and trying to fend off the ‘dreaminess’ that has afflicted him since Ralph, his first son, died of Reye’s syndrome four years earlier. Now divorced from ...”

“... were warped in their image.‘Every Saturday night we had ballroom dancing in the great marble hall,’ said Caroline, ‘and the headmistress sat drumming her fingers, with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth and a glass of crème de menthe. We had to dance with her father, who’d been wounded as a sapper in the First World War: either he had his ...”

“... already routinely tackle Darwin’s day-to-day theorising through the crucial 1837-9 period. No Victorian’s daily thoughts have been picked over so precisely by a squad of scholars. So much is published that a managerial meta-industry is already springing up to collate and correlate. Yet the more esoteric these studies become, the easier it is to lose ...”

“... title for the forerunner to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘Stephen Hero’. Turpin is no hero to James Sharpe, who sets out to cut him down to size, just another ‘callous, brutal and violent’ criminal, an ‘unpleasant thug’, hardly distinguishable from so many others, so that when The Lives of Noted Highwaymen was published around 1750 he ...”

“... different from ours, except for the fact that they speak and have bodies. There can be no alien abductions, since any aliens who bothered to abduct us would not be aliens. UFOs, like utopias, are epiphanies of the beyond which bear witness to the fact that we can never attain it. The most mindbending of literary genres provide evidence of our ...”

“... complex’ in a speech about the death of ‘global Europe’. On the opposite side of the hall, a man from the Danube Institute gave me back copies of the Hungarian Conservative. He had come straight from a US Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest, where Viktor Orbán had called for Donald Trump to be returned to office. There was an ...”

“... but ripe for removal; like those who controlled the Light Programme in the years before rock’n’roll. Several novels and short stories have absorbed and portrayed the rave revolution over the years, and now raving is being given a history. There’s no consensus about its origins: to some of the writers discussed ...”