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“... else. You don’t soon forget one like that. I was at the back of the healthfood store round the corner buying some arugula when the floor and shelves started trembling. Pretty soon the soba noodles and apricot-flavoured, wholewheat PowerBars were falling round my head and shoulders. Most earthquakes seem to begin as if a big truck, an 18-wheeler carrying ...”

“... too. The same can’t be said of Here and Now, a collection of communications between Coetzee and Paul Auster sent between July 2008 – a month after Kannemeyer’s approach – and August 2011. This extraordinary book comes with no explanations other than the flap copy: Although Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee had been ...”

“... I showed up the skies were protected by helicopters. ‘Here comes a mob,’ somebody said. At the corner of Kennedy Boulevard and Tampa Street, policemen in riot gear formed a line to meet the Poor People’s March of socialists and anarchists. The cops far outnumbered the protesters. A man with a megaphone and a black plastic boot on his head addressed the ...”

“... inexplicably named her as his vice-presidential running mate. They could have picked Dr Rand Paul, ophthalmologist, freshman senator from Kentucky, and son of über-libertarian Ron Paul. (Contrary to rumour, he is not named after Ayn.) Paul is opposed to government ...”

“... and Jim Hussey come across socially as chaps to go into the jungle with, although novelist Piers Paul Read might demur: despite being warned by Biggs that he was being wound up, he more or less accepted the robbers’ concocted revelation that the robbery was financed by Otto Skorzeny the scar-faced Nazi daredevil. Men who pull off a world-record ...”

“... book about the decay, destruction and conservation of art, Condition: The Ageing of Art (2015), Paul Taylor reminds his readers of the fragility of artistic endeavour: 95 per cent of all the art produced by the Dutch has been destroyed, and if it’s not 95 per cent, then it’s 99. A reputation that’s forgotten is often all that’s required for an ...”

“... a framed still from a favourite film, A Hard Day’s Night; an essay by Eula Biss referring to Paul McCartney and ‘Norwegian Wood’; McCartney sporting a man bun during his lockdown vacation; rave reviews for McCartney’s new lockdown solo album; various reflections on the fiftieth anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various ...”

“... New Zealand looks rather a long way away on most maps – somewhere in the bottom right-hand corner, usually – but one can tell, even from London, that the intellectual atmosphere at the University of Canterbury must be something very special, at least in historical studies. Somehow, whether because it perceives itself to be perched on the far edge of ...”

“... customarily take up on entering a lift: the first beside the controls, the second in the corner diagonally opposite, the third somewhere along the rear wall, the fourth in the empty centre and so on; all of them at once turning to face the front, as though on parade. He terms the resulting intricate array of mutual aversions a ‘sociogram’. He’s ...”

“... a pressing one.4 August. Rupert goes upstairs to do his Pilates on Zoom. His teacher is round the corner, but she is currently with her husband in Canada. Still, up he goes in his T-shirt and shorts as it’s quite strenuous, and it makes no difference that she’s on the other side of the world.13 August. Big rows over A levels. I’m not sure if I would ...”

“... verminous mattress on a damp floor. Here, I feel, we should better consult Decline and Fall, where Paul Pennyfeather languishes in Dartmoor, taking the rap for the exquisite but evil Margot Beste-Chetwynde, and reflects onthe undeniable cogency of Peter Beste-Chetwynde’s ‘You can’t see Mamma in prison, can you?’ The more ...”

“... fuzzes the shadowy outline of Ian Penman, a laureate of marginal places, folds in the map, is that Paul Schrader, the director of a sassy remake of Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, admired Penman’s review so much that he invited him over to Los Angeles to talk product. Penman in California was truly the vision of a man who fell to earth, a pale alien in an X ...”

“... that while its secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, and its foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, would meet the vice president, they wished to distance themselves from his views. What followed, according to the official Vatican statement, was ‘an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by ...”

“... large ‘dining room’ in the middle providing unlimited food and water, and nest boxes in each corner. Calhoun released ten rats into his city – five males and five females – and for the next 27 months observed their behaviour from a watchtower. He noted every birth and death, and many thousands of social interactions. He conducted autopsies on the ...”

“... Trump flag hanging in the alcove where we used to smoke with the seminarian; my father locked in a corner of silence, not seeming to see us. He shot out his own hearing? we gasped. Yes. With a high-powered rig like the one that kid in Pennsylvania used to send the bullet whistling past Trump’s ear.I had felt what was going to happen in October 2024, coming ...”