“... employees. If conditions at other Amazon facilities are any guide, these lucky few can look forward to being worked to death, or near it. These are the jobs on offer in the emerging neoliberal utopia. Clinton’s utopian faith depends on fantasies of a reified technology, unmoored from class and power relations and operating autonomously as a global ...”

“... addition to Bradbury’s invented personages the conferees include Martin Amis, Günter Grass and Susan Sontag (she skips one of the later conferences in the narrative, on the grounds that there is something more interesting going on in Northern Italy). Bradbury’s Villa Barolo is funded by the American Magno Foundation – offspring of an empire enriched by ...”

“... A Gathering of Fugitives. But although the genre has been sanctified by such outstanding books as Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation or Stuart Hampshire’s Modern Writers, compilations of this kind still often have something raffish and opportunistic about them. And nowhere do they more plainly invite suspicion than in the titles they bear. A Mania for ...”

“... democracy of Forest Trees.’ To press Keats’s youthful interest in specific political issues forward onto the later work seems to me a skewing of the temporal evidence. It is certainly right to point out the ‘seditious’ implications of the more overtly political early poems, and the freethinking implication in recommending ‘the beautiful mythology ...”

“... message on my Facebook Wall. Self-destructive thoughts when forced to admit they can’t. Like Susan Boyle, all one wants is to have one’s little life back. B., thank god, seems fine. Calls frequently from Cambridge on the Crackberry; thinks I’m making an insane fuss about moving five houses up the street. Full of kind spousal forbearance when I tell ...”

“... a dangerous thing to do,’ whereupon the boy apologises. However, another of the group then steps forward and says, ‘Are you father and son?’ While it’s not a question that requires an answer, it’s not friendly either. I say, ‘Come away,’ and we walk on.29 May. Remember as a child at Halliday Place in Armley when Dad was rubbing his face with a ...”

“... and to render him finally visible. The Vision of Elena Silves has a narrative which flits back and forward over Peru’s apocalyptic years, from 1965 to 1986. At the starting-point a philosophical young revolutionary, Gabriel Lung (he has Chinese blood), falls in love with Elena Silves (she has Portuguese blood). Elena has a religious vision and performs a ...”

“... Several​ of the last century’s finest non-fiction writers – Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin – longed to be novelists. In interviews with the Paris Review, each touched on the tension and insecurity involved in their dual métier. Sontag wrote in surprisingly aspirational tones of ‘the novelist [I’d] finally given myself permission to be ...”

“... of 1871 looked backwards to a pre-capitalist past, doomed to defeat; the anarchism of 1968 looks forward to the future society almost within our grasp, certain of success.Well no, actually, I don’t think so. Although it is true that a certain esprit de soixante-huit survived the year of its birth, and had its final – and not least honourable – moments ...”

“... generation. Crosland’s life now settled down. He met and later married an American journalist, Susan Barnes, and was selected at Grimsby, a seat he held from 1959 until his death. Thus based, he was well equipped to become a shaper of the nation’s future, which was what he had always intended. Somehow it did not happen. In conventional ...”

“... biographer of Oliver Wendell Holmes and civil rights activist). Her older sister is the poet Susan Howe, her younger sister the artist Helen Howe Braider. This suggests a network of ramifying achievement and a complex burden of inheritance. On her paternal side, Howe was descended from two prominent New England families: the DeWolfes, who were slave ...”

“... nor loyalists to tell the truth, while 92 per cent didn’t trust the British state either. As Susan McKay describes in Bear in Mind These Dead (2008), nationalist and unionist communities have both at times brandished their grief at one another; in the mid-2000s, they held rival victims’ demonstrations in Belfast and Dublin respectively. Even agreeing ...”

“... different from anything previously experienced. All sorts of omens are read as indicating the way forward out of modernity’s blood-drenched darkness. But how? Take the case of anthropology. The great lurch forward into market-driven unification – suggesting a world in some ways akin to one nation and state – was bound ...”

“... like the conflicts in a sitcom, predictably easy to resolve, and what’s left to drag the reader forward are Mordden’s frequent pronouncements of his Grand Theme: that gay people have an important role to play in history. When, for example, über-gay man Frank announces that he will come to San Francisco, Mordden writes: ‘Indeed, Frank was ...”

“... fear, then a white light from which some beneficent doorman out of central casting steps forward to welcome the newly departed. This anteroom of the world to come is taken for granted by millions, including possibly the same 86 per cent of Americans who told the Larry King Show that they believed in aliens and almost certainly the proportion of that ...”