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“... franchise, and spam emails offering penis enlargements and fat sums of money from Nigeria. This no man’s land of media culture is Coupland’s home ground. The astonishingly full and varied body of work that began with Generation X in 1991 is populated by alienated characters: a beauty queen, a medium, people caught up in human-interest news stories (high ...”

“... poverty. There is another cloak joke in Don Quixote, about St Martin who divided his with a poor man: ‘from which we may conclude that it was a cold day for such was the saint’s charity that had it been a warm one he would doubtless have given the poor man his whole cloak.’ Cervantes was poor for a purely literary ...”

“... and there is no evidence that he did so, any more than there is reason to suppose that Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose name suggested laurels sacred to Apollo, supposed that people would think him a descendant of that Greek god when he used the laurel as a device, or that the noble Orsini wished to claim kinship with the bears (orsi) by which they announced ...”

“... bureaucratic existence is their only alternative. Here is Japi on his education: Then your old man sticks you in an office. And you realise that the reason you learned all those things was so that you could wet slips of paper with a little brush. And it’s always the same old routine, be there nine o’clock sharp, sit there quietly for hours and hours. I ...”

“... in the seat of consciousness nor at his nerve ends, but in a generalised feeling of being Michel de Montaigne. He was not alone in almost, so to speak, losing it. In the second chapter of Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau recounts how, on 24 October 1776, outside Paris, he was rushed by an enormous Great Dane. He calculated at once that his only ...”

“... a letter stops to talk – and what enables him to break the ice is that she is a woman doing a man’s job. 8 January. By train to Cambridge on a day of blinding sunshine and bitter cold. We eat our sandwiches on the train, a busy, bucketing electric job that scampers through Shepreth and Foxton and very different from the plodding little steam train I ...”

“... Anglo-American political science is dominated by the image of rational man. Politics is the maximising of something or other: material benefits for the voter, votes for the politician. Politicians competing for the voters’ favour have to think strategically and rationally. They cannot waste effort on lost causes, nor afford to take up positions too far from the centre ...”

“... in 1916 John Quinn began collecting his work; he knew the photographers Edward Steichen and Man Ray – and Romanian connections, which were maintained all his life. There is hardly a significant name which does not turn up in some context or other, from Picasso and the Douanier Rousseau to Nancy Cunard and ...”

“... weird compulsions and his sister’s suicide, as written up in Freud’s case history ‘The Wolf Man’. In Freud’s view, the Wolf Man’s story was easily resolved, a classic allegory of Oedipal trauma; but for later critics (Abraham and Torok, Deleuze and Guattari), the case dramatises the inadequacy of the Freudian ...”

“... the author’s partner, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, writes to Jérôme Lindon at Editions de Minuit to advise that Beckett does not wish his novel to be entered for the Prix des Critiques. It is 19 April 1951, Beckett is 45, the novel in question is Molloy. Suzanne explains: What he dreads above all, in the very unlikely event of his receiving a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Flight into Egypt, for instance, and umpteen pictures of gambling and card games which, even by de la Tour, I find hard to take. Rupert as always looks more carefully than I do and gets more out of it. A terrific picture by Ribera of an old man with the withered and drooping flesh of his arm exactly done (via his ...”

“... to shock whites out of their apathy’. Ellison’s hyper-cerebral protagonist in Invisible Man, who is able to see far beyond his own condition, was a pointed rejoinder to Bigger’s inarticulate and explosive rage.That rage had once been important to Ellison too. During their days in the CPUSA, he had sent a letter to Wright commending Bigger’s ...”

“... preferred today. Enough material there for a whole case-history. Notwithstanding the title of Paul Alexander Juutilainen’s recent film docubiog about Marcuse, Herbert the Hippopotamus, the slack-sphinctered pachyderm in LaRouche’s first sentence refers not to Marcuse, late consort of Korsch, Davis and the Weathermen, nor even to Lyndon Jr’s own ...”

“... These tales of mob and gang will be appreciated by man and boy, but especially by those of us who have survived fifty-odd years of life in Britain. Our day-school years in the Thirties were much influenced by the public school system, expressed in schoolmasters’ aspirations and schoolboys’ comics. Simon Raven’s notorious devotion to that system began when he was only a seven-year-old comic reader, as he admits in The Old School, a loving but mordant survey of the dormitory schools: he went on avidly to Charterhouse and he fancies other men will envy or scorn that experience, as he himself scorns or envies men from rival dormitories ...”