“... book, you will get three full pages (approx. 1000 words) to say exactly what you like. Litt may use the conventions of chick lit, but Finding Myself is not arranged like a trashy novel. Presented as Victoria’s manuscript, it has a dizzying construction – notes towards a work of fiction rather than the work itself. An early draft, it comes with ...”

“... highly cinematic adventure story of daring and survival, told from the perspective of Snowman, who may be the last surviving human being after a virus has destroyed the population of a futuristic biotech world. Wearing a Red Sox baseball cap, wrapped in a sheet against the cruel sun, scavenging for food and sleeping in a tree to escape lab-bred animal ...”

“... to make the problem vanish, and conscious, on the other, that little good and much unpleasantness may come of its being found out. Such vanishing acts require, in the painter’s estimation, ‘a bit too much irony’. A surprising choice of words, perhaps, though irony and sentimentalism depend on the dissonance between manner and matter, and they have a way ...”

“... either in the country to which removal is to be effected or in any country to which the person may subsequently be removed’. In 1994 the UN high commissioner for refugees found the principle of non-refoulement to be part of customary international law, the universal law that binds all states irrespective of treaty obligations, observing that states ...”

“... same and also different. To adult children who have not yet needed to care for their parents, or may never, lucky dogs, this may be a cautionary tale.’ ‘Diagnosis is everything,’ she tells us at the outset. Her advice? Challenge doctors: ‘Doctors are not gods, though some act that way. Some hate being ...”

“... of the imagination which created it, though a reader familiar with Pester’s short stories may have some suspicions. The title story of Am I in the Right Place? (2020) features a ‘Mondelux single-man-in-a-bedsit oven with rotisserie setting’ that turns out to be a portal to childhood memories. In ‘Lifelong Learning’, from the same collection, a ...”

“... spent years tracking them. But none of them thought herself in need of rescue. This last claim may be true enough: Murphy, de Acosta and Garland were all formidable women, largely unacquainted with self-pity. But not only is Cohen being a bit perverse – the salvage operation here is grand and thrilling – she sounds a tiny bit wishful too. Her ...”

“... Sartre – for or against? Raymond Aron – for or against? … Should we take a blowtorch to May 1968 and its ideas … seen now as incomprehensible, elitist, dangerous and anti-democratic? Have the protagonists of that revolution … all become little bourgeois capitalist pleasure seekers without faith or principles, or haven’t they? … The father ...”

“... Martin Scorsese, there was nary a murmur from her (just imagine what she might have made of Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky). We know from Nunez and others that Sontag boogied in Studio 54, and yet where was her disco inferno deep-think? Disco as tribal ecstasy rite cried out for her always-on receptivity and rapid insight. Instead she piled on the ...”

“... by an infantile would-be king while the future is being forged in Shanghai and Beijing, America may no longer be a serious country. It may even be a laughable one. Yet, as the Swedish diplomatic historian Anders Stephanson writes in his book American Imperatives, ‘the alarming fact’ is that ‘everyone on this earth ...”

“... wouldn’t have been any fuss at all if it had been his mother claiming the boy not his father. 7 May. I’m coming to the end of Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s novel supposedly based on his friend and associate Allan Bloom. I’m never entirely comfortable with (and never unaware of) Bellow’s style, which puts an almost treacly patina on the prose ...”

“... to Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Documents, if genuine, show that she chaired the company. She may have been in a hurry but she did not wish to be seen taking the arm of a uniformed president. He was not prepared to forgive her past. The couple’s distaste for each other yielded to a mutual dependence on the United States. Neither party could say ...”

“... he was on a plane to Belgrade, although five years remained on his prison sentence. Radoman, who may have been flipped, becoming an informant for Serbian intelligence, or may even have been one all along, soon flew to Valencia, where he owned an apartment. When he got there, he found more than 200 kg of cocaine, stashed by ...”

“... to fight in distant lands when America’s chief war-businessman commands. Ulster Protestants may be the last to gladly claim the British name. Britain is still that irregular archipelago to which Pytheas ...”