“... threatens to stifle for ever the essential life of the characters. Think, for instance, of Paul Morel, who is left at the end of Sons and Lovers totally bereft, but walking towards – well, what? Like Alvina Houghton in The Lost Girl, like Aaron Sisson, Gilbert Noon has to get right out and become ‘unEnglished’, as Lawrence puts it. So he is ...”

“... and almost never – a further compliment – to the contemporary writers he most resembles, Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami, whose amiable postmodern noirs unfold in urban labyrinths and feature cerebral men searching for their own identities, and enigmatic women with an alarming tendency to vanish. He has produced novels with fantastic industry, and ...”

“... of the fantastic’ for the rest of New York. But his heart belongs to the Manhattan grid, the 12 north-south avenues and 155 east-west streets drawn on open land in 1807. The grid was a piece of real estate speculation (John Jacob Astor made his fortune not by trading furs, as American folklore has it, but by buying up blocks as the city pushed ...”

“... playne harts doe in the faces rest; Where can wee find two better Hemispheares, Without sharpe North, without declining West? What ever dyes, was not mixt equally. If our two Loves bee One, or Thou and I Love so alike that none doe slacken, none can dye. The poem describes the erotic glow at the beginning of an affair. ‘Countrey pleasures’ contains a ...”

“... Kaminskys might have been among them, had it not been for the efforts of Adolfo’s older brother, Paul, who successfully petitioned the Argentine consul in Paris. In January 1944, they were released. ‘Why us, and why not them?’ Adolfo wondered. In Paris, he bought chemistry books from bouquinistes along the Seine and taught himself to make explosives. But ...”

“... near the UN building and Ralph Bunche public schools dotted across the land – including one just north of Manhattan’s Morningside Park, four blocks from my office. But Bunche is no longer a household name, and while the children entering that school can surely tell you something about Martin Luther King Jr, and probably about Malcolm X too, I wonder what ...”

“... of the people’, the construction of the Myitsone dam, a vast and destructive Chinese project in north-east Burma, would be suspended. Then in October two hundred political prisoners were released, followed by 651 more in January, among them Burma’s most famous and long incarcerated dissidents. A festival of independent film took place in Rangoon organised ...”

“... very old ones, many of them doing more than one job. After 29 years in Parliament the 81-year-old Paul Flynn has made his front bench debut as both shadow leader of the house and shadow Welsh secretary. Corbyn and his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, have also been abandoned by several of the high-profile economists they signed up as advisers in ...”

“... The Mueller report goes on to recount an incident that is eerily reminiscent of a scene in North by Northwest: ‘Page was aware that he was the individual described as “Male-1” … Page later spoke with a Russian government official at the United Nations General Assembly and identified himself so that the official would understand he was ...”

“... sharing the enthusiasm of Sarkozy, who was eager to reassert French imperial prerogatives in North Africa. The Franco-American friendship began with a mishap. Walking up the stairs of the Elysée palace, Clinton stepped out of her shoe; Sarkozy ‘gracefully took my hand and helped me regain my footing’. She sent him a photo of the incident ...”

“... and impedes its progress – or attempts to impede it – with a view to making her protagonist, Paul Rayment, more interesting. Is it her fault, she asks, that Paul has turned out so dull? He arrived in her imagination uninvited and now she is saddled with him. In ‘The Pole’ the touch is much lighter, the purpose of ...”

“... like Brandt, were German. The spread of TB was one of the legacies of the First World War. As Paul Delany tells us, in Germany TB sufferers doubled in number in the last two years of the war, when ‘soap disappeared completely, and the streetcars were foul with the distinctive stench of famine.’ Rolf Brandt, Willy’s younger brother,would later talk ...”

“... the South through artisans and teachers in the middle of the country to industrial workers in the North. It also had a richer intellectual heritage, in Gramsci’s newly published Prison Notebooks, whose significance was immediately recognised well beyond the party. At its height, the PCI could draw on an extraordinary range of social and moral ...”

“... Indiana. The student producer, Peter Cheeseman (now Director of the New Victoria Theatre, North Staffordshire), together with the stage manager Alan Curtis, bulked up Empson’s spare and insufficiently dramatic verse with ‘alchemical mumbo-jumbo’; the composer Gilbert Kennedy ensured the grandness of the occasion with a score that incorporated ...”

“... Iran. It didn’t occur to him that they would be lukewarm supporters of his agreement with North Korea and do their best to thwart his pledge to detach US armed forces from Afghanistan and Syria. In one of the morning hours he could spare from the wall with Mexico, Iran returned to Trump’s mind, and on 30 January he tweeted a denunciation of his ...”