“... of teenagers was likely to be disrupted by the police. However ‘phobic’ policies and laws may be in the United States, constitutional rights there would make such intervention illegal. Minton also points out that every legislative restraint to public freedom is fiercely contested in the States. Here restrictions have often been slipped in with minimal ...”

“... but under lens-filter or colourwash buildings withstood innovation, each a pickled Piper come what may. When the then queen directed his attention to the wisteria in the Frogmore gardens in Windsor Great Park as an excellent subject for his pen and wash, Piper responded politely but retreated to the rooftops, where he found aspects of Windsor Castle more to ...”

“... poured in enormous numbers of men and huge quantities of matériel. Sherman and Churchill tanks may have been no match for the Tiger but there were far, far more of them and that was the telling factor. On 30 July the Allies took Avranches but the battle went on into August as frantic German counterattacks were first held and then crushed. Avranches was the ...”

“... says, ‘we are engaged in a type of dreaming. Each gaze that falls upon an object of interest may yield a moment’s reverie.’ It is, he thinks, important that we don’t know the names of all the buildings, don’t know their history – just as it is important on a country walk that we don’t know the names of all the trees, flowers and geological ...”

“... But as Michael Quinton suggests in his ‘World Wide Words’ note on the internet, the reference may well be to another Isabella and another siege, the siege of Granada by Ferdinand and Isabella that ended in 1492 (this one lasted eight months – quite long enough for the purpose). A more prosaic derivation could be that the word comes from the Arabic izah ...”

“... now seem almost ordinary: Sure, he towelled, if it is this fair way that answers up to you, you may dismiss the vowels because one does not remember the yak that does not immediately remember one. One does not scan the roads for politeness or contribute to the desert economy. And lo what he said became true for everyone on earth and there was no parallel ...”

“... and indigenous populations interacted and co-operated’. The symbolism each assigned to fire may offer some insight into the cultural gulf dividing Rome and Carthage. For Romans, fire was negative, destructive – hence the immolation of Carthage by Scipio. For the Phoenicians, it was restorative, purifying, necessary to generate rebirth. In his ...”

“... can seem like a surprising next step after Nostalgia, whatever stylistic qualities the two books may share. Nostalgia describes a multiple, uncertain, open-ended world while Blinding expands inward, plumbing the infinite depths of an individual imagination. It’s as though Cărtărescu has chosen to withdraw from any topical literary or cultural ...”

“... had died. At the end of the book, he suggests – foolishly or disingenuously – that corpses may have been brought to the hospital from somewhere else. Sheri Fink wasn’t at Memorial during the hurricane, but she has interviewed hundreds of people who were, first for the website ProPublica and for the New York Times, now for her unsettling and excellent ...”

“... would occupy too great an emotional space in my life and leave no room for other things which may also have been destined for me. These are the thoughts of a man who is in exile from a civilisation that no longer exists, and will be condemned, eventually, to extinction. Because of his preoccupation with memory and his fondness for long sentences, Gazdanov ...”

“... of public finance. On top of that, the neoliberal Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership may soon force all public health services in the UK – Scottish as well as English – to invite competition from American private firms. This ravenous alien was only able to squirm into the UK spaceship because in 2012 Cameron’s coalition had already ...”

“... that pop into your head. Does that sound pretentious?’ Giving four answers and a qualification may have been characteristic: ‘We haven’t got a message really; the lyrics are open to interpretation. They’re multi-dimensional. You can read into them whatever you like. Obviously they’re important to the band.’ These sentences aren’t the usual ...”

“... city, the Biennale, in 1895. Selvatico must have known his time was short: construction began in May 1894, only a month after the idea was announced at a meeting of artists and writers at Caffé Florian, starting with the demolition of the Tommaso Meduna riding school, which housed army horses and an elephant called Toni. The proposed site, the Giardini on ...”

“... As for the Odyssey, ‘he hadn’t bothered to read’ it, though Chaudhuri clearly has. There may be much that is autobiographical in the novel: Chaudhuri, like his Telemachus/Stephen Dedalus figure, was a student in London in the 1980s. But there’s enough distance for the writer to see the character with a balance of ironic detachment and ...”

“... the pro-Union vote was divided among Labour, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and, strange as it may seem, the SNP, which downplayed any talk of independence and masqueraded instead as Authentic Old Labour. Under normal circumstances, the SNP would have interpreted its 56-seat triumph as a mandate to negotiate independence. But at the current juncture, in ...”