“... of perpetual transience?’ Kraus asks. ‘To remain in one place is either privation or luxury. No one I know who’s died in my lifetime … has been interred in a grave.’Born in 1947 in New York City, Kathy Acker lived and worked as an adult in lots of places, most significantly downtown Manhattan, San Diego, London and San Francisco, with long spells ...”

“... a way that fits her restless temperament. When Mungo makes friends with a Catholic boy, she raises no religious objection, even saying that she ‘winched’ his father (kissed or dated). For a Protestant to drink Buckfast Tonic Wine might seem a marginally ecumenical act, since it was originally made by Benedictine monks in Devon. Not drinking with the ...”

“... DJ who’s hep to the vital Swing rhythm the kids all dig, and the stuffy station owner who wants no part of her indecorous jive. Miller, as the wide awake DJ, specialises in the wake-up call requests of local servicemen, and the film was a big hit with US military personnel stationed overseas during the Second World War: ‘Gooood ...”

“... inquests and complaints about police conduct were to be abandoned or wound up within a few months; no new civil claims for compensation would be allowed. On 1 May this year, outstanding cases were handed over to a new investigative body, the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR). Its team of investigators, who have police ...”

“... eradicate such viewpoints from universities. You can also believe that universities should become no-holds-barred venues for free and open debate. But it takes a certain mental flexibility to think that the one can be a way of achieving the other.Does the right contradict itself? Very well then it contradicts itself. The new Higher Education Act appears on ...”

“... adjustment, displacement, collapse), terra incognita. Every map is a fiction, a legend. It is no more the territory than memory is the past.Such considerations would not have been mentioned to the pupils of the primary school in Câmpina which my father, Donald Slomnicki, then seven and speaking only a smattering of Romanian, attended from the autumn of ...”

“... lives at once hard to see and hard to miss, archly recondite and recklessly available – will no doubt confound Poet Ladies everywhere. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be twiddling our chopsticks and going all clammy. Ironically, Cohen herself resists the notion that she is merely bringing light to the clueless, though that is the most immediate and ...”

“... marginal position in the contemporary historical consciousness. In 15 years it has left virtually no trace in these pages. Popular images, despite increasing tourism, remain scanty: folk-villains on the run, seasonal parades in fancy-dress, periodic football triumphs. In cultural influence, while the music and literature of Latin America have swept round the ...”

“... that it disappear through miscegenation. As a teenager he found some measure of protection, and no end of personal satisfaction, when he was admitted to the most prestigious neighbourhood gang of whites, who proudly and ostentatiously displayed on the back of their red jackets the insignia of the Spartan Athletic Club. Since he wasn’t ever to be much of ...”

“... the documentary Regarding Susan Sontag (2014) and in the feminist fight club classic Town Bloody Hall (1979), where, from the audience, she takes Norman Mailer to task for his patronising use of the term ‘lady’ as a prefix – lady writer, lady critic. Even when issuing a rebuke (‘It feels like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t feel right to ...”

“... of their marriage, she reported that he did ‘not look well or robust or rumbustious at all. No sign of a woman’s care about him. No cosy evenings with dogs and gramophones, I should say.’ Occasionally, he heard reports of Vivienne’s condition from her brother Maurice or Ottoline Morrell, one of the few of ...”

“... and the peek-a-boo portrait of himself! How cunning of Harvard to market the Arcades as another John Grisham or The Jewel in the Crown.) I do not recommend my reading tactic to others. This is a book for moving about in, lightly and irresponsibly and, above all, fast. Benjamin seems to have dreamed of a final, rapid-fire, cinematic delivery, accelerating to ...”

“... so she did the frame up with some white gloss, which flaked over the years. I used to lie on the hall carpet and look at the picture of the farm for ages; the field was golden enough to run through and get lost in, and the brown daubs of farmhouse were enough to send me into a swoon of God-knows-what. I suppose it was all part of a general childhood ...”

“... you’ll be able to meet more whores than writers and see more pimps than literary agents – no equation intended. If this happens in the metropolis, imagine the colonies. And Havana was the nearest Latin city to urban America – unless you want to insult Tijuana and call it a city. Before 1960 there were a few private houses but these mostly published ...”

“... empirical, habitual, traditional, the adversary of all systematic politics, of reaction no less than reform; a thinker who preferred writing about the Derby to expounding the Constitution, and found even Burke too doctrinaire. The amiably careless, comfortable image is misleading. To set Oakeshott in his real context, a comparative angle of vision ...”