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“... disparity up to American exceptionalism, but that’s more a slogan than an explanation. And as David Garland points out in Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition, on this and many other matters of criminal justice, the United States is not so much a single nation as a federation of 50 states, each of which has substantial ...”

“... Songs of PapuszaI was once besotted with a black-eyed boy. The young menof my kumpania stretched him out in an àshariba. Only thendid Dion´yzy Wajs, ancient Dion´yzy Wajs, pay his coin and court.He possessed harps, bought my mother and stepfather’s heart.All I possessed were secret books. Dion´yzy arranged my bedas we both wished. There will be no children, he had said ...”

“... The Antarctic Poetry School Historically, the absence of even one writer has been the least of the Antarctic School’s worries. Is its hallmark cool tone sustainable in today’s climate? I suspect not, though the Old Antarctic for ‘burning zeal’ is ‘thin ice, beware’ and ‘splash, ha ha’. Most traditional verse forms are too complex to have been ever attempted ...”

“... Out by the woodpile at 3 a.m., knock-kneed and shitfaced, lost in your own backyard, you pour a libation that comes straight from the dregs and she drinks it. Or you stand at a sinkful of broken this and that wide-eyed and with nary a hint of what’s next, as she goes by with her Tesco bags and a fifth of gin in her pocket. She keeps unholy hours. There’s a chance you’ll see her naked at noon among roses; a fair chance, too, that in bending to cup a bloom, she’ll show you the little widget of her arsehole, damson-sweet and, some say, the very fount of knowledge, though certain dream- images, featuring sweats and the shakes, somehow cause me to doubt it ...”

“... XIXThis room now: papers and books: a long drift over tablesover chairs to the floor. She said: ‘You’ll find him hereup to his arse in the tar-pits of poetry: find him lostin some landscape of the mind: the mind’s perfect drearsalt-marsh-as-moonscape-as-snowscape-as-white-over-whitewhich is limitless from skyline to skyline.’ She said: ‘Thereare ghosts here that crowd and jostle: they feed off silencesand wait for nightfall ...”

“... be messy too. Commentators are already pointing out that if this is 1992 all over again then David Cameron is going to have a hellish time with the rebellious fringe of his own party, just as John Major did back then. But this is the wrong sort of mess. It is not compromise and accommodation in the name of defending politics against the forces of ...”

“... After a painting by Jeremy LeGrice … in London, of course you are, landlocked in your kitchen, but just a step, after all, from the door into the hall, and then just a step from the door into the street where the cabbie is more than happy to wait by the slip-road that takes you out through the wrecked hulks of tower blocks, happy to stop- start-stop in the backed- up traffic, its tide-race of tail-lights, its surf of crap and slop, letting you out with a minute or so to spare for the westbound train, a minute or less, so you scarcely believe you’ve done it, except landing-lights in the bare backs of houses are slipping past too fast for counting, while some sudden, clear, cold wind is shaking the fire-escapes like rigging, and that sky-high blur of dark cloud laid on darkness is the test of where you are, of what you’ll come to next, which is why you fall asleep from fear or habit, which is why you wake up with the ghost of kitchen-whiskey, why the first and last shreds of memory hold only the best and worst of what you first intended, as your fist strikes the window, as your foot slaps the platform, putting you just a step, a step or two, from the cliff path and the path that goes from the cliff to the beach, wind ringing your ears almost as much as the cries of seabirds which fast become the birds themselves, afloat on the massive uprush of air that flows from the root of the cliff and up over its lip, which makes you think, ‘Bird’s-eye view: myself just pate and boot and little salt-white hands,’ while you trample out the pith and bladder of seaweed, setting off the unholy stink from its silky, liverish reds, beyond which lies nothing, lies nothing at all, unless it’s the sea that cheats the eye, the sea that gives endless accounts of itself, running green and green-and-white, and a deeper green beneath; you can hear it, can’t you, that low-in-the-throat, that hysterical hiss; you keep your eye on the fault-line, don’t you, where sea and sky squeeze out a line of light; you’ll stay there, won’t you, fronting the weather, learning it all by rote? – Bird’s-eye view: myself almost out of sight, little salt-white… And that deeper green beneath to prompt you ...”

“... i. Port Meadow, Oxford, 1983 Walking to Woodstock Road from Wytham where leaf-worlds welled from all the wood’s wands, we talked salmon, midges, flood meadows, the energy system cindering softly under us, slow-cooking the marshlands. ‘The gate ought to be here. The map said so. That map back at my flat . . . Look, there’s a spot somewhere this way where sheep shove through ...”

“... any party, including the Labour Party of Tony Blair and the Conservative Party of Blair’s heir, David Cameron. Glasman has no fundamental problem with Cameron’s notion of the Big Society, which he takes very seriously. He absolutely is not one of those who think it’s just a fluffy cover story for an ideological programme of radical Tory cuts (which is ...”

“... poll of party members in 2010 had Ed Miliband winning by 4 per cent when in fact his brother, David, won that section of the electorate by nearly 9 per cent). If Corbyn does win, there is talk of a swift coup to replace him, but the Labour Party is not the Conservative Party and kneejerk anti-democratic moves are a much harder sell. Ed Miliband must take ...”

“... these non-stop flyers mate on the wing is something for which, according to the chief authorities (David Lack and Derek Bromhall), there is no firm evidence. I have watched them for nearly sixty years, at home in North-East Scotland and Westmorland, in the Dolomites and on Gibraltar, and from high up on the Blouberg in Transvaal, and their closest intimacy was ...”

“... Palmier’s sombre encyclopedia of exile, published in French in 1987 and now translated by David Fernbach, offers seemingly endless evidence of the ways in which exile often punished over and over again those who fled Germany after 1933. One story is symptomatic. Hans Bendgens-Henner, a pacifist refugee who had first settled in Holland, was expelled ...”

“... novel. But Lin doesn’t do anything cute with the names: he uses them as straightforwardly as David Foster Wallace uses X and Y in ‘Octet #6’, for example, or as Lorrie Moore uses Mother and Baby in ‘People like That Are the Only People Here’. Jonathan Lethem has said that ‘strange character names are an easy way to make sure the reader ...”

“... with great efficiency. In February 1936 he was assassinated by a troubled Jewish medical student, David Frankfurter, who knocked on Gustloff’s door, was invited to wait in his study, and shot the returning Landesgruppenleiter four times with a revolver before giving himself up to the Swiss police. Frankfurter is the second character, a Serbian rabbi’s son ...”

“... executives for potentially offensive photographs or slogans.) When Pye drifts on to portraits of David Merrick and Trevor Nunn, the book loses its way, and the last essay, on Robert Stigwood, is fanzine stuff. The film Sergeant Pepper is presented as a dismaying hiccup in Stigwood’s otherwise brilliant career. No consolation is offered to those who paid to ...”