“... a sock on a rooster’); and the more persistent, reliable, searching composite view of the man. Stevens was the ‘grindingest guy they had there in executive row’ at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company; in his letters he was precise but ‘only colourful when he was writing to some old friend’; he kept no photos of wife or daughter in his ...”

“... he advised on the decoration of her new house.) Ada Leverson was not worried by Wilde’s train de vie. To another friend, who said he was on a strict regimen ‘in the hope of keeping my youth’, she replied: ‘I didn’t know you were keeping a youth’ – this, like other unpredictable things, in a low voice, almost thrown away. To use her circle’s ...”

“... of street children living around the Hidalgo Metro stop. Others are urban types: the tyre repair man, the sewer cleaner, the organ grinder – according to Villoro, ‘the out-of-tune sound that emanates from the device reminds us of the state of the nation’ – as well as the army of street vendors. (They play a prominent role in Mexico City’s ...”

“... of the middle-class vote as being the products of eight years of Thatcherism. In fact, this class de-alignment had been visible as a trend (and extensively written about by academics) for several years before the advent of Thatcher. The real question is not whether she has pulled workers over to the Tories but whether Thatcherism is not in part the product of ...”

“... Vehicle One, or the ‘electric turkey’ as critics have unkindly called it) may join the De Lorean, cold fusion and Clive Sinclair’s C5 self-propelled sitz-bath in the technology junkyard. ‘Electrics’ – battery-powered automobiles – have a venerable pedigree. The first successful model was exhibited at the World’s Fair in 1892. William ...”

“... the design of this great building implied a date half a century or so later. William Marshal was a man for firsts. Another archaeological delight is to contemplate his grave-monument in London’s Temple Church, scarred in 1941 (with dark appropriateness) by a war whose technology was even more impersonally brutal than his own military prowess. There you may ...”

“... story of his singularity was repeated so often that in 2014 his biographers Martin Lee-Browne and Paul Guinery could still claim that ‘Delius would spend his life composing music that bore no relationship to anything, good or bad, that had been written before.’Delius has been perceived this way in part because he wrote music that was not easily associated ...”

“... some of the more significant snatches of dialogue, as when Barley Blair says he is the wrong man, and his controller replies: ‘We’re all the wrong men. We’re dealing with wrong things.’ Readers looking for a spy novel may be disappointed. This is a book about a spy-world, a metaphor for the leaky transparent world we have made – Le Carré ...”

“... rhythms and what Leonard calls ‘glitzy crap’. This glitz was the leading feature of Brian De Palma’s remake of Scarface, with its play on luminous surfaces in which blood, neon and Miami sunsets finally merge into a single crimson garishness. The same glitz features in the current TV hit, Miami Vice. Mafiosi are usually portrayed as dressing like ...”

“... one by one. Still, the effect is there, and this is a lot of travail in only three years, and the man who said ‘my own aim is to suppress my own biography’ is clearly writing his own pre-emptive life story: he is the man who suffered, the man who did too much, the ...”

“... drawl:well mi dhu day wok an mi dhu nite wokmi dhu clean wok an mi dhu dutty wokdem seh dat black man is very lazybut if yu si how mi wok yu woodah seh mi crazyInglan is a bitchdere’s no escapin itThe sight of a Black man openly criticising Britain on national television reverberated through diasporic circles. The ...”

“... Kristeva’s​ book on Dostoevsky appears in a series from Buchet/Chastel called ‘Les Auteurs de ma vie’. Earlier titles included works by Stefan Zweig on Tolstoy, Thomas Mann on Schopenhauer, Paul Valéry on Descartes, and contributions from living writers such as Marie-Hélène Lafon (on Flaubert) and Michel ...”

“... on the origin of the modern world in tracing the emergence of what he came to call ‘desiring man’ to a point between the late 17th and the 18th century, with antecedents in the specialised confessional disciplines of Christian monastic life. He discerned in the age of reason a new, sinister shift of interest to the sexuality of children and ‘the ...”

“... other bones of creatures from mouse to mammoth (he believed the latter to have belonged to a huge man), a tulip garden, artefacts from across the whole of the newly-discovered globe, stuffed crocodiles and a live elk that doubled as a lawnmower. The most amazing thing about their story is not the spectacular rise in the family fortunes, nor the transition ...”

“... Afew hours​ after Jean-Paul Sartre was injected with mescaline by his friend Daniel Lagache, a psychiatrist at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, Simone de Beauvoir phoned to check in on the first-time tripper. Her call came as a reprieve. As Sartre told her in a scrambled voice, she had interrupted a losing battle against a mass of octopuses ...”