“... of Rick Moody’s previous work, Purple America charts the lives of the ‘slovenly, affluent’ young. It’s not an especially good life. Moody’s characters are distinctly unhappy, unformed, unable to proceed with their lives in anything like a reasonable way. Instead, they gradually succumb to a set of local problems. When the logic of crisis is put in ...”

“... United States. He was shocked by American coffee, but calmly prepared for the MLA. ‘J’ai lu David Lodge,’ he boasted, brandishing his tattered copy of Small World. For the first time in 110 years, the MLA held its December meeting in balmy and palmy San Diego instead of frost-bitten Chicago, Toronto or New York. The San Diego convention centre is a ...”

“... futile’. He was what is now known as an abuser. He derived sexual pleasure from causing pain to young boys, especially by smacking their bare buttocks. All the boys at School House, Shrewsbury, knew of this abuse. The identities of Trench’s special victims were also well known. Peel quotes the then headmaster of Shrewsbury, Jack Peterson, describing the ...”

“... cultures – because it both ‘assimilates and homogenises’. Two foreign observers of Italy, David Lane, the Economist correspondent in Rome, and Paul Ginsborg, who teaches at Florence University, are now also arguing that fascism has returned to the country. Lane begins his book on the beaches of Lazio in January/February 1944: ‘That winter was among ...”

“... enthusiasts filed into the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock to hear a piano recital by the young virtuoso David Tudor. That they should be here, tucked away in the Catskills, was already extraordinary. The Maverick is more hermitage than concert hall: a wooden, barn-like structure, set – in 1952 at least – in ...”

“... ski jumper Walter Steiner, whose talent he claims to have spotted from the first. ‘This quiet young man had something ecstatic in the way he flew, though technically he still had flaws … His element seemed to be the air, not the earth.’ In 1972 Steiner won gold at the Olympic Games in Sapporo and the World Championships in Planica. In 1974 Herzog made ...”

“... of the voters had left their quiet houses, voted ‘No’, gone home and shut the door. At seven David Cameron was on the radio. He intoned the words ‘our United Kingdom’ so many times I thought I’d be sick. Whose United Kingdom? Theirs. The Eton Mess and their cronies. Big Business. Neocons. The warmongers. Not ours. We left Edinburgh at ...”

“... has it, was brought to him mid-set). ‘At the peak of its popularity in the 16th century,’ David Berry writes in his history of tennis, ‘Paris alone had 250 courts, including one at the Louvre and another at Versailles, the latter of which was occupied in the revolution of 1789 by the Third Estate as a symbolic protest at the elitist nature of this ...”

“... waiters, until it becomes their proper nature. It is the same with writers and artists. Byron or David or Robert Lowell cannot slink off and become their ordinary selves in the intervals of being poets and painters and men of the age. Greta Garbo is always Greta Garbo, once she has found the part. But there is quite a different category of actor, as of ...”

“... explorers seems to have become a popular pastime. In recent years, Oliver Ransford has diagnosed David Livingstone as a manic depressive, Dennis Rawlins has discredited Robert Peary’s claim to the North Pole, and William McKinlay has proved that Vihjalmur Stefansson was a selfish cad. Debunking probably was inevitable. These men were all of the heroic age ...”

“... the Final Solution was intentionally such that very few records of essential decisions were kept; David Irving may even be formally right in his assertion that there is no written document to link Hitler himself with the Final Solution until October 1943; and the same absence or confusion in the written record has even been taken as evidence that the whole ...”

“... of cool and careful thought as well as full information about the nuclear issue and its origins. David Holloway explains that ‘the central theme of this book is the development of Soviet nuclear weapons.’ He has ‘tried to provide a coherent – though inevitably incomplete and provisional – analysis of Stalin’s nuclear policy’ in terms of ...”

“... Motivation is attenuated or omitted. In ‘Preparation for a Collie’, for instance, a young family seems resolved to dispose of their dog, for no particular reason except to ‘simplify their life’. The boy, David, of kindergarten age, can hardly share this hope but makes no plea in the animal’s ...”

“... assayer in the United States Mint in Philadelphia. Stock points out that in the 1890s the young Ezra ‘mixed with the assayers and drank in stories about “gold bricks”, which he still remembered in 1944 when he wrote his pamphlet on the “Economic Nature of the United States”’. Pound was still alive when Stock was writing, and assisted ...”

“... my driver the finger and yelling ‘Wank-eeeer!’ in a thick Brummie accent. The reason for that young man’s presence in Kabul and for the similar journeys so many others have made has become the subject of a prolonged, charged and still unresolved political debate. But the fact that more British Muslims are fighting for Islamic State than for the British ...”