“... Wallace’s thesis seems self-evident now that the United States’s economy has striated into white-collar and service-oriented jobs, and its major growth sector is the merged ‘industries’ of entertainment and communications technology; on the other hand, it’s more than a little problematic. What’s meant to distinguish Infinite Jest (the ...”

“... David Davis, there is not much evidence of a new beginning. He has dropped virtually none of Michael Howard’s baggage: he simply proved more adept at reordering it than Davis. He has persisted in arguing that we can have both lower taxes and better public services: an argument the electorate regards sceptically and something that has eluded all British ...”

“... echoed the culture, which meant that for most of the 20th century it was deemed best to be rich, white, thin and young. In the England of Enninful’s youth, this meant Sloaney blondes with big hair and big shoulder-pads. In America, it was society women with famous surnames and huge clapboard houses on the coast of Maine. Paris Vogue was much the same, just ...”

“... parse and digest. Coetzee won his Booker Prizes for portrayals of South Africa (Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace). Everett gained recognition for a novel about an African American novelist, Erasure (2001), and was included on this year’s Booker shortlist for The Trees, a counterfactual comedy set in 2018, in which Emmett Till returns to Mississippi ...”

“... to her when she read it in A Passage to India. She had started out as a missionary among the white savages of Britain, and by the Twenties and Thirties had come to see herself as another version of Forster’s Mrs Moore. Like Mrs Moore, she possessed a ‘double vision’, which in her case reflected the dual provenance of the Fabian Society – its ...”

“... Michael Young’s biography takes Bronislaw Malinowski to the age of 36, when the brilliant Polish anthropologist completed his field study of the Trobriand Islands, married, and prepared to make his career back in Europe. Young is a Melanesian ethnographer himself, and the book comes into its own when Malinowski arrives in Australia, on the eve of the Great War, and begins the expeditions to Papua that effectively marked the beginning of modern anthropology ...”

“... Rosa slapped on a queasy mid-tone mix of sienna and smalt blue; capped it with brisk blurts of white; later, knocked the resulting rock planes back into readable order with red and yellow glazes. But that vertical divide of his, tumbling and forking in ever crazier lurches, still retains a lightning urgency. Here you meet the gestural painting of the ...”

“... making: among other points he has established significant common ground between Burke and Marx. Mr Michael Freeman’s position in all of this is initially uncertain. The blurb seems to imply that he shows what a powerful case Burke makes for radicals to answer. But in fact Mr Freeman is much more interested in descriptive work than in recruiting the great ...”

“... of activity was Piccadilly, with its toilets and rent boys – there was even a gay bar called the White Bear with an entrance in Piccadilly Circus Underground Station. Policemen sat around drinking tea in the attendant’s room of public lavatories, scratching at the white painted glass to get a better look at the ...”

“... Jennings, who died two years ago, wrote too many poems. She was careless about her output, sending Michael Schmidt, her editor at Carcanet, ‘sacks’ of manuscript work to sift through and make into a collection. Even he seems occasionally to have lost track. His sympathetic and shrewd introduction records that her own favourite among her poems was ...”

“... the election, but because he lives in Massachusetts his vote is unlikely to put Trump in the White House. He thinks of Hillary Clinton as a corporate shill, a politician ‘who’s never had a job in her life’, part of a dynasty that shouldn’t exist in America. He’s suspicious of the Clinton Global Initiative, but he doesn’t go in for right-wing ...”

“... chrome is see-your-face; theirs is in-your-face. It’s a loweringly humid afternoon on which four white men are standing trial in a city courthouse accused of depriving a black man of his civil rights, especially the right not to be batoned following traffic violations. The sheriff’s car with which I have been making tender eye-contact in the rear-view ...”

“... and upper-middle class mad could live in a world of mock-domesticity. Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White is only the tip of the iceberg. Part of Charles Lamb’s greatness must be that he never wanted to bury his own family disaster in this way, to earn respectability by shuffling off responsibility. One of the houses that Lamb made into a haven for his sister ...”

“... haven’t got teeth at all, ‘just a row of brown stubs, like iron filings, top and bottom’. White Teeth, Zadie Smith’s polished, attractive fictional debut (LRB, 21 September) didn’t make the shortlist; it seems a shame. Frank Gauci is happy to ‘gamble on anything that moves’, a problem for shortlisted novelists leading sedentary lives, but not ...”

“... his crew had found themselves in Paris in May 1968 in the thick of the événements. His producer, Michael Gill, recalls ‘riot police … just off-camera’, adding, laconically: ‘I was gassed.’ Despite being so apparently out of sympathy with the temper of ‘these days’, Civilisation was hugely popular. Now, when even more of what Clark stood for ...”