“... claims to be the guilty one. The detective story is as much of a structure as a requiem, and we may see that patterns and structures are themselves themes in her poetry. It is at once a religious and a scientific fascination, not with the structures and patterns that explain or console, but with those that mystify and make ...”

“... prurience that accompanied Stead’s anger would be fatal to the ideals that meant most to him. ‘May I not plead with those, who have not yet lost their heads in the whirl and din of this popular Maelstrom, to consider whither the stream is really carrying us?’ It has carried us a great deal further than Carroll could ever have ...”

“... between commerce and art. And yet Tati himself never quite emerges from these pages. Readers may feel that they get closer to him in the book-length interview conducted by Penelope Gilliatt in the Seventies (now long out of print). But even there he remains elusive, a purveyor of rehearsed anecdotes – many of them now exhumed by Bellos, and expertly ...”

“... the turn to capitalism after the war and his daughter thinks that an offer of marriage made to her may have been withdrawn because of her father’s art, though she tries not to let her suspicion show. When another round of marriage negotiations begins, Ono is aware that this time his prospective son-in-law has hired private detectives to investigate his past ...”

“... relationship with Bellone was a close one, and Biocca and Canali speculate that Bellone may have acted as a father-figure to the informer. Silone was an orphan who had lost his father early and most of his other relatives, including his mother, in an earthquake in 1915. At any rate, if this book has a hero, it is Bellone the sensitive ...”

“... as big as a football’. Mao and his men rated the power of words higher than most, and this may explain why they went to such lengths to suppress non-aligned literature in China. From the early 1960s until the mid-1980s almost all Western books were prohibited and the printing presses clattered away producing agitprop: multi-volume hagiographies of ...”

“... was ‘Fountains’, but there isn’t a poem called that. Schmidt means ‘Fountain’. This may be just a typo, but it’s a revealing one. If you read a lot of Jennings’s work, the poems blur into one another; there is too much repetition, too much rewriting of the same poem, too many neat little verse essays. There is a lack of rhythmical ...”

“... for all practical purposes invincible. It’s hard not to feel that the high drama of Manhattan may be misdirecting the world’s priorities. A few years from now, aircraft will be among the safest places in the world to be. You only have to build them so that the cockpit and the cabin have two separate entrances, each from outside the aircraft. Then you ...”

“... existing social structures and cultural expectations kept women firmly shut out.’ Men’s wages may have been higher or more regular, but they were needed to support dependent wives: it is unlikely that there was any great increase in families’ living standards. Griffin also discusses marriage, sexuality, education, religion and political involvement ...”

“... Mississippi dreamed of nothing more and tried to join up. But planes went down in fights. In May one of the most admired pilots, Raoul Lufbery, jumped or fell from his burning plane. The Ace of Aces, they had called him, the most revered American aviator in France. ‘To the young pilots Lufbery flew with,’ Hynes writes, ‘he was an older and wiser ...”

“... spring the New York Review let us go our own way. The LRB became a paper in its own right in May 1980, when the first independent issue appeared. (John Lanchester will write about Karl and the LRB in the next issue.) For all its genius Karl’s Listener was still a conventional London weekly, though affiliated to the BBC, rather than a political entity ...”

“... most African Americans are also European Americans. She thinks that one of her great-grandfathers may have been from Italy, hence a family preference for Italianish names: her mother derived Condoleezza from con dolcezza. One of her biographers, Elisabeth Bumiller, says that Rice likes to joke with friends about whose white ancestors were the most ...”

“... provides an explanation (when Tassie overhears both sides of a critical phone conversation, it may be because ‘Sarah was a little deaf and had the volume on everything turned up high’), but the effect is of seams showing, as if the story has gone beyond the scope of the person telling it. There is nothing romanticised about this adoption, almost as if ...”

“... groups or clandestine agents’. The alleged collusion between Saddam Hussein and Zarqawi may have been an invention, but this type of collusion is widespread, from the CIA’s backing of Central American death squads to the anti-FARC paramilitaries sponsored by the Colombian state. The problem with trying to assess the epistemological status of ...”

“... critique of the exploitation of children at the hands of the rapacious music industry, but he may have lost sight of the real tragedy of Bieber. More than any other pop star before him, Bieber gives the impression of an alarm system sounding a series of warnings for a doomed adulthood. His hypothetical backstage suffering is less interesting than the ...”