“... past in silence Swifter (it seems) than the water’s passage. For certain ones what was written may come true: They shall live on in the distance At the mouths of rivers. For our ones, no. They will re-enter Dryness that was heaven on earth to them, Happy to eat the scones baked out of clay. For some, perhaps, the delta’s reed beds And cold bright-footed ...”

“... you alright? Now are you sure you’re alright?’ the canal at the back, seedy as Xochimilco, the May air full of seeds, alder and plane and sycamore, generative fluff, myself fluffy and generative, wild-haired and with the taste of L. in my mouth, the office workers opposite very evidently pissing behind milk-glass, goslings and baby coots without the white ...”

“... for my seed and their seed,    bring stones to shatter the blundering toes of my enemies, and may the heart of the sweating    evil man, seeping all that pig fat, fall so sudden with startle and dread,    never to rise again, never to rise ...”

“... of bread. I’ll bring a tape of Irish music to charm the ghosts beneath the ice. Some of you may act like Michiganders and cut holes to fish through, or slip through and swim underwater like the mad Finns of Minnesota – or maybe just make needle-holes of piss. And we might just find time for stories, the one about the team of horses that fell through ...”

“... of Axum or of Karnakit gets a mention of a line or twoin the architectural guide-bookwhich may well have been scraping the ...”

“... comforting in their vagueness: at least they made some comment on my obsession, for although grief may sometimes imagine that it wishes its privacy respected, in fact it senses insult when it is ignored. Replying brought a tiny, masturbatory release; the least welcome were those with a well-meaning postscript: ‘On no account, whatever you do, must you dream ...”

“... planning for the early summer has been postponed indefinitely by the onset of Covid-19. The virus may have changed the game, but not the preoccupations of environmentalists. To many, it presages the difficulties that climate change has in store for us; it will bring us to our senses, they hope, and force us into a massive salvage operation that protects our ...”

“... but even Manzoni is susceptible to the overly theatrical gesture, the rhetorical flourish that may have worked in his day but now strikes us as an exaggerated movement from the silent film era. Levi was not himself a great novelist; If Not Now, When? is his weakest work even if it was the most immediately successful. He was not a great writer of short ...”

“... for all to see. It seems likely that very early on certain newspaper execs – and Rusbridger may have been one of them – made a guess: soon enough, the paper part of newspapers would disappear altogether, and the money saved from having to print and distribute paper news would compensate for money lost from cover price. Like commercial TV ...”

“... is no. Anyone who thinks that it can has a moralistic view of reality. Anyone who thinks that good may impose itself on the world without struggle or the use of power is mistaken. Anyone with a basic understanding of politics knows that what is good does not come automatically. That may require an army. A Napoleon. Or a ...”

“... where he remained until he resigned on grounds of ill-health in 1922. He died in 1924. We may not believe, as we are told in the preface to The Office Writings, a selection from his legal and clerical work, that ‘much of Kafka’s greatness . . . is owed to his office job,’ but we can certainly agree that anything we learn about his job will ...”

“... driving force behind his burlesque of the Dunciad, which survives only in manuscript draft. (It may be that this particular satire, like the slightly later Epistle to Mr Lyttleton, remained unpublished because of his discomfort with having to display such virulent hostility towards Pope – a writer he elsewhere calls ‘the greatest Poet of his ...”

“... It’s not that the politics don’t make a difference. They make all the difference. But they may be the only difference there is to make, and the sheer intensity of the parallel investment in writing becomes all the more troubling. Literature on both sides – there probably isn’t any literature in the centre, at least in Bolaño’s view – is ...”

“... playground for every conceivable intellectual, aesthetic, political and psychological tendency, it may or may not be regrettable, but it is hardly surprising. In view of all this heavy reading and even heavier theorising, and leaving aside his musical genius, the two most impressive things about the author of The Artwork of ...”

“... and the story of a life especially is made up of assumptions, desires and fantasies about what may have happened or could have happened. Still, the reading public took Mahmoody’s book for fact, and it made life even more difficult for Iranian Americans. Her success started a trend in memoirs by Western women who have ‘survived’ the Middle East. In ...”