“... crowd in perpetual motion, oysters at midnight, and all of it ‘bounded to the south by London’s dark blood stream, the Thames’. The book (a modest 234 pages) was anecdotal, speculative, inhabited. There was something going on. The past blistered seductively like the golden skin on a good Welsh rarebit. The project was a live one, working hard, after ...”

“... cities (the Hacienda in Manchester and ‘Cream’ in Liverpool being the two clearest examples). So much has changed that the leading lights in dance music – especially top DJs – who were once considered outsiders in the music business have become a new establishment, holding on determinedly to their powerful positions but ripe for removal; like those ...”

“... to original chaos of mud water fire and air. Morning and evening its one soak and the sun’s more or less a sponge, and lately comes up frozen quite stiff.This love of chaos, motion, process, which is the energy of his best poems, and often makes them resemble action paintings, is brought to a halt by the strong stresses on the last three words ...”

“... intolerance? Is it a geographic territory or a phantasmagorical hyperreality in Baudrillard’s sense – something that is more real than real, a hall of mirrors in which the separation between the world and its representations dissolves? Or perhaps all of the above?The ‘rich confusion’ of American identity, as Baldwin put it, has given rise to ...”

“... only just arrived. His was at the top in one of his versions of the story; it was beside Wilde’s in another. In either case, he later wrote that he took the sponge, wiped his name out and made his way quickly to the railway station. Gide, who was 25, had met Wilde before in Paris and Florence. He left three accounts of their meeting in Algiers; some of ...”

“... Warhol, Solanas rode the six floors with her victim in the elevator up to his office. ‘Solanas’s bullets,’ the Times reported, ‘punctured his stomach, liver, spleen, oesophagus and lungs. At one point, the doctors pronounced him dead.’ Warhol, who was almost forty at the time, lived for 19 more years.He was born in Pittsburgh – ‘the worst place I ...”

“... the American Library Association; he was a 15-year-old science fiction fan.The convention hall’s exhibition booths featured lots of plastic slipcovers and display racks, as well as tables full of books from publishers that relied on library sales. That’s to say, a lot of reference books, a lot of speciality ...”

“... dolphins about, clangingly, to kiss: ‘Tomb Slab of an English Couple’, the label in Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum says. The couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville ...”

“... by these policies was enough to force many politicians into making grand statements about Europe’s obligation to save lives, and even to consider opening borders or increase resettlement numbers. The Paris attacks supplied an excuse to start closing borders again, since it appeared that one or more of the perpetrators had slipped into Europe along the ...”

“... activities which enabled him in youth, as did his drinking, to face the prospect of a lifetime’s hard labour on the land. After just such a life, his own auld farmer addressed his auld mare in these words: Mony a sair darg we twa hae wrought, An’ wi’ the weary warl’ fought! An’ mony an anxious day I thought     We wad be beat! Yet here to ...”

“... ten thousand angels Could waltz on the head of a pin And not feel crowded than to wonder if now’s the time for the armies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire To teach the Serbs a lesson they’ll never forget For shooting Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo Carl Dennis, ‘World History’1 The cover of Multitude invites bookshop browsers not just to read ...”

“... backhanded endorsement of women artists in its regular ‘Retrospect of Fine Arts’: ‘In an age so generally marked by the frivolity and dissipation of our women of rank, the few who by the cultivation of the fine arts emancipate themselves from these fashionable fetters, and display the elegance and taste so fascinating ...”

“... the most unexpected metaphors. It is rare to find luminous powers of realism and narrative clarity so finely combined with a high poetic temperature. Joseph Brodsky said that there is a poem on every page of Roth, and certainly, Roth’s almost nervous fondness for metaphor recalls the image-blessed, image-sick prose of ...”

“... start at lunch in Phoenix airport: Terrorist Threat Level Orange for ‘high’ as usual, women’s restrooms jammed, and then the waiter in Aunt Chilada’s Cantina – garish faux-Mexican with a jalapeño pepper theme – calls me ‘sir’ when he takes our order. Fume for a second, then descend into bath of elemental ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”