“... her memoir she writes: ‘All dope can do is kill you – kill you the long slow way.’ Holiday may have lost her way; but she never lost her audience. ‘I’ve always been fortunate as far as the public is concerned. I could kill myself if it wasn’t for them.’ Lady Sings the Blues was written three years before Holiday died. Apart from the pitch and ...”

“... After all, there’s a strange sort of authenticity about a man who lies straight to your face.24 ...”

“... Stein: ‘Call anybody Paul and they get to be a Paul.’) During this stretch of the book, we may start to think, as Paul does, that he’s really, ‘like, chemically or something’, a woman – that he’ll settle in a true, final state. He follows Diane to Provincetown but she breaks his heart (‘You want to be everything, all the time … I just ...”

“... quite legitimately, fill in the details of the ideal schema in different ways.’ Leach may not have been able to decide between structuralism and functionalism, but he was unyielding in his opposition to the school of anthropology associated with Durkheim’s disciple A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. According to this school, traditional societies were ...”

“... to the point where ideological affiliations play an overt role in judicial appointments. Tribalism may soon become the determinating factor in White House decision-making as well, for George W. Bush and his entourage don’t deal in shades of grey. As far as they’re concerned, the distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong, us and them, are ...”

“... his voice and said ‘Sir, you and I have sat here with a board between us now for 27 years. May I venture to ask your name?’ The reply from the other side of the board was: ‘Sir, you’re a very impertinent fellow.’ The ingredients are good enough, but the finished product puts one in mind of a tasty bread made without enough yeast. Langford’s ...”

“... done in classical myth, the great model, of course, being the conquests of Zeus himself. Thetis may accept a mortal husband, but she doesn’t want to have mortal children. ‘Achilles is the seventh. Six times Thetis has taken a wet new infant up by the heels and dunked it, umbilicus trailing,’ in the caustic waters of the Styx ‘where she’d let it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Duke of Bedford – to his own advantage. He posed as a moderator of disputes at play and may well have done good service in that line, but he apparently did nothing to exclude sharpers from the rooms. The opportunities to lead gulls to the plucking were plentiful. Eventually, a string of new laws banning certain games of hazard had a disastrous ...”

“... Blair arrived breathlessly one day before catching the train at Euston. The piece he delivered may have required more ironing than Rushdie’s, but it too, in October 1987, found its place in the paper’s pages. He wrote that Mrs Thatcher ‘will wield her power over the next few years dictatorially and without compunction’ and further predicted that ...”

“... When you pour hot coffee in it the pope appears in the sky! So dear heart – my new address as of May 20 – will be . . . * Cioran & Hazlitt have lots to say about envy, writers’. It’s pretty scary. What makes it scarier is that often ‘They’ put you down & haven’t even read your work. Like Gide with little Marcel. Didn’t even open the ms. I ...”

“... cast is assembled and the detective delivers a tidy summary, are rare. In Italian whodunnits one may discover who did it, but – a reflection of Italian reality – the criminal is rarely collared; the writer gives you the satisfaction of solving the crime, but withholds the pleasure of letting you see justice done. Carlotto echoes the pessimism of many ...”

“... agreed that mirrors, or their substitutes, portraits, are places where hidden realities may be revealed: it is the portrait in the attic that shows the inner loathsomeness of the outwardly attractive Dorian Gray. Folktales and legends are full of examples of truth-telling mirrors. In any number of ghost stories the silent presence of the ghost can ...”

“... will filch it. Moore has even complained of Clarke flattening the flat tax. The flat tax may well be right for, say, the new economies of Eastern Europe, but in long-established economies like those of the United States and Western Europe it would be largely a device for making the rich richer, which is no doubt why it appeals to the neo-cons here ...”