“... study of the ‘systems of the body’. The book is remarkable for its lack of other people. Sam, Ehrlich’s dog who was struck by her side, is given a character we come to know as rounded and vibrant. He works hard, is loyal, affectionate and alert; and is duly rewarded with hamburgers and fries at fast-food chains when there is one nearby. Blaine, the ...”

“... tell him that people receiving American food parcels were not chanting, ‘Thank you, Uncle Sam, for the rice,’ but: ‘By our blood, by our souls, we will sacrifice our lives for you, O Saddam!’ Somebody fucked up, and blame is thrown from hand to hand like a live grenade. Sooner or later, if nobody falls on it, it will blow them all away. The ...”

“... novels, the last three of which are available in English (from Harvill) as All Souls, A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. All three are admirably translated by Margaret Jull Costa, who not only catches the meanings of words with grace and precision, but gets rhythms of thought, and even better, rhythms of afterthought to carry over into ...”

“... I would happily hold forth for hours about the rugged terrace-time I’d served, at Feethams, White Hart Lane, the Manor Ground. And when it came to the archival stuff, if you could spare the time, well, so could I. ‘Name three of the Spurs’ double side’s reserves,’ I’d say, or: ‘How many of the 1964 West Ham cupwinning team had names ...”

“... and Virginia Woolf; and with Chiang Kai-shek, Hitler, Mussolini and Roosevelt, not to mention Sam Goldwyn and Charlie Chaplin. These are the men and women who made the modern world, and the Modernist expression of it: their identity as a generation is more important than 1914, a year in which some of them began to fight a war, but more of them ...”

“... deplore manifestations of ‘people’s power’ and wonder whether they shouldn’t increase VAT. Sam Shilowa, the president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, is surely right when he says that it is ‘inconceivable’ that the pre-1994 ANC could have come up with its present macro-economic strategy – reduction of the budget deficit from 6 to 3 ...”

“... and her husband, the ‘Duke of Ellington’. The people who told you the stories were always white and they had never heard the commentator themselves; either ‘a friend’ had, or they’d ‘heard’ that it had happened, thus confirming that one, and possibly two, comfortable old South African realities were still in place. In any case such stories ...”

“... dire Jim Carrey utopia. The mayor of the city, and the governor of the state, are two mirthless white ethnic conservatives named Giuliani and Pataki. They have restored capital punishment, and encouraged franchising of all sorts while discouraging loitering and littering. Not long ago, a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima was grabbed outside a funky ...”

“... to King’s College Choir School as a ‘mouldy day-bug’, and here the chaplain, Eric Milner-White, is said to have interested him in religion. Michael certainly took to Milner-White – the inventor of the service of carols and nine lessons – whose photograph was on his wall when he died. There was, at the Choir ...”

“... just arrived, you’re wrong: ‘I was always already here!’, in a ‘sexy brocade cheong-sam/and my enormous prick & balls/showing through dress!’Notley had two sons with her first husband, Ted Berrigan, and her early poems are full of children’s voices. In ‘January’, one asks: ‘Mommy what’s this fork doing?/What?/It’s being Donald ...”

“... Ghanaian independence. She saw ‘people running through the streets, looters carrying bales of white cotton that unendingly unfurled, streaming between them like a gushing river’. By the time Ghana became independent in 1957, she was away at school in England.In 1961, Busby took up a place to study English at the University of London, having convinced ...”

“... emporium of wonders, or sociable nexus, in favour of Spartan purity. The unlikely father of the ‘white cube effect’ was Casper David Friedrich, whose studio’s one ornament was a T-square dangling from the wall, a reminder of honest German craftsmanship in keeping with his penchant for woodwork and frame-design. Of course, Friedrich’s brand of mystical ...”

“... included school walkouts and demonstrations by tens of thousands of African American, Hispanic and white pupils; ‘the first gay street protest in America’; anti-Vietnam protests so intense and disastrously policed that they helped persuade Lyndon Johnson not to stand for re-election; extensive activism by the Black Panthers and other Black Power ...”

“... her buggered by an Irish builder on the bonnet of a BMW one more time. Meanwhile a gay man like Sam, who runs a cheese shop in the town, can have a tender live-in relationship with handsome Harry that is refreshed rather than undermined by regular orgies, well-run and splendidly catered. As an individual I have a huge vested interest in the viability of gay ...”

“... never leave, I began to keep a diary of what it felt like to be there in the days of its snowy white disintegration, which felt also like the disintegration of my own mind. My interest was not academic. I did not care about the Singularity, or the rise of the machines, or the afterlife of being uploaded into the cloud. I cared about the feeling that my ...”