“... borrow or read. Anyone over eighteen could explore the marble labyrinths of what is now called the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building: a palace of the people on 42nd Street, traditionally known as the Main or Central Branch, with its encyclopedic holdings. In the reading room, battered but still grand, readers waited for their number to appear on the indicator ...”

“... such as ‘take a lot of pictures and post them’, ‘form groups and maintain them’, ‘have small gatherings’ and ‘contact your members of Congress’. By the bar, people talked about bringing the Democrats to ‘more rational and moderate positions’. The next Trump defector took the stage. ‘An immense amount of buyer’s remorse is ...”

“... Fornes had it at her sparky fingertips. As an artist she was the real McCoy, Sontag’s friend Stephen Koch observed: ‘Not a pretend one, and not a critic, and not a discussant, and not a graduate student making notes.’ She was, in short, a natural. When it came to sex and art and many basic day-to-day activities, Sontag wasn’t a natural, being ...”

“... As much is secreted away in that child as in the writer he’s become. At 55, Aharon is a small, bespectacled, compact man with a perfectly round face and a perfectly bald head and the playfully thoughtful air of a benign wizard. He’d have no trouble passing for a magician who entertains children at birthday parties by pulling doves out of a hat ...”

“... Acting as MC for the occasion, Inglis introduces us to the mourners – Terry Eagleton, ‘small, solid, mischievous’; Charles Swann, ‘wheezing with his awful respiration’; Patrick Parrinder, ‘silent, smiling, ironic’, the best-dressed of the party; Tariq Ali with ‘lustrous brown eyes’ but (Inglis claims) ‘a bit out of it all’. As a ...”

“... the minimum calories needed by the population within the strip’s ‘humanitarian zones’ – a small fraction of the territory where people were ordered to congregate ‘for their own safety’, their lives minutely subject to the diktats of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and their quadcopter drones, bombers, snipers and mobile artillery. During the past ...”

“... not only stereotyped and tiresome but dated in a way that Leopold Bloom’s responses to women, or Stephen Dedalus’s don’t seem dated. There is no element of richness or surprise, and there is a terrible ironic distance and jauntiness (more noticeable in The Luck of Ginger Coffey and The Emperor of Ice-Cream). Clearly, the passage quoted above could not be ...”

“... goes up a quiet suburban street, past a quiet suburban house, on which it would be easy to miss a small brass plaque advertising the services of a psychotherapist within.’ There Anton talks about his life and a family tragedy to a professional who sees him as viewing everything through ‘his usual prism of narcissistic injury’.Though Bob has been ...”

“... When I got to his house this second time, Norman was sitting at his dining table looking wiry and small. He walked with two sticks and was six months from death. He was reading the New York Times and circling things: he had on one of those armless, fleecy windcheaters and a pair of Ugg boots. When we sat down to talk he told me to let him have it – ‘both ...”

“... is currently concentrating economic power in the hands of a ‘cosmopolitan upper class’ – a small global plutocracy which threatens to undermine democratic welfare states by ensuring that a country which tries to protect its poor from exploitation will end up by depriving them of jobs. There is a danger, however, of exaggerating the stand-off between ...”

“... the measured outputs of the coerced and managed work-force with the unpredictable creativity of small risk-taking teams to which ‘rulism’ and corporate planning mean only death. The advocate of Excellence sighs with relief as the regulated work-place-factory, cotton-field or centralised office – is consigned to the scrapheap of history. In place of ...”

“... Milosz’s ‘Child of Europe’, of which this is Section Four:Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality.Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself.So the weary travellers may find repose in the lie.After the Day of the Lie gather in select circles,Shaking with laughter when our ...”

“... David Evett in Discourses of Service called ‘volitional primacy’ – a paradoxical variant of Stephen Greenblatt’s celebrated ‘Renaissance self-fashioning’, in which a servant’s selfhood is asserted through the deliberate performance of subordination. Its archetypal expression is to be found in King Lear: for the banished Earl of Kent in his ...”

“... more than a week old. In his book Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers, the geographer Stephen Graham quotes Hito Steyerl, a German video artist: ‘Many contemporary philosophers have pointed out that the present moment is distinguished by a prevailing condition of groundlessness.’* Call it ground-zero vertigo. Non-specific ...”