“... in his childhood, two stand out: the first is of the young Lynch registering with horror the black, ant-infested sap oozing out of a cherry tree, a sign of the ‘wild pain and decay that accompanies everything’; the second is of Lynch and his brother playing on the street one evening, when a naked woman with a bloodied mouth stumbled ‘out of the ...”

“... American network television for two months. During those two months, ABC news had 121 stories on Michael Jackson and 42 stories on Natalee Holloway, a high-school student who disappeared from a bar while on holiday in Aruba. CBS news had 235 stories about Michael Jackson and 70 about Natalee Holloway. I heard that in the ...”

“... be felt, five of the six men who were ambushed and shot were unarmed at the time; and a sixth – Michael Tighe, shot dead in the barn – had no paramilitary connections. John Stalker’s special brief was to determine the involvement of the RUC in these events. One of the most disquieting revelations made in the press has been the degree to which the ...”

“... recognise them as exceeding the limits of our own experience, and hence to confront a nauseating black hole within our everyday self-satisfactions. The subjectivity of others is essentially ‘impenetrable’, and ‘radically refractory’ to our understanding. ‘No consciousness can even conceive of a consciousness other than itself,’ Sartre said. We ...”

“... rather remarkable correspondence with a nun called Sister Lawrentia. Her disapproval of his Little Black Girl in Search of God upset him, and when he asked her to pray for him he obviously meant it. A report of her death proving false, he remarked that he felt ‘a soul had been dragged back from felicity. Which is queer, as of course I don’t believe ...”

“... books. (The ellipses in the lines below are mine.)If I seem mirthful it is tinsel & spangles on a black ground …Our earth is honeycombed with cells of fire. We sufferthe Poles to fight themselves out & the Danes & the Circassiansand need not expect pity when our turn comes …The stove within me rages …I am walked and scorched to death …We are first ...”

“... a building for which there was no longer a social purpose. Most of the children reading here are black or Asian, with Somali children in the majority. As a so-called economist Littlewood presumably thinks the place would be better used as a Pizza Hut.26 March. Wake this morning thinking affectionately of the spring in the grounds of Jervaulx Abbey which ...”

“... And now, here’s The Pale King, this book-shaped version of the ‘long thing’, assembled by Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s editor on Infinite Jest, from ‘a neat stack of manuscript, 12 chapters totalling nearly 250 pages’ discovered by Wallace’s agent on the desk in his home office, augmented by a selection from ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of less ...”

“... because they assumed he was a semi-Fascist ultra like themselves. But, as the Cambridge historian Michael Postan put it, ‘They are such fools: they thought they were electing a Tory and never realised that they were electing a Whig.’ Mrs Thatcher imagined that the scholar who had written The Last Days of Hitler would share her hostility to a reunified ...”

“... cushions featuring doggy pin-ups, pert chows and shivering, ratty, handbag things floating above black modernist thrones. Lucky babes in an unlucky world. Red and white ribbons giftwrapped the latest auto-shunt. This is a two-car town, congestion addressed by the never successful gimmick of particular numberplates allowed on particular days. Even the ...”

“... Gown (1987), which describes his introduction to counterintelligence in London during the war, and Michael Holzman’s James Jesus Angleton: The CIA and the Craft of Counterintelligence (2008). But Angleton laid out on the page is nothing like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for ...”

“... monkeys on the ends of chains. Small pale-skinned children stared at us as we approached, their black hair long at the back and cut straight in the fringe – the characteristic Penan mullet. On each of the platforms an entire extended family cooked, ate and slept. A week ago, there had been nothing here, and in a few weeks’ time the Penan would have ...”

“... Thames had long been used as a common dump for human and animal excrement. In 1855, the chemist Michael Faraday was horrified by the river’s appearance and stink: ‘The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid’; ‘The smell was very bad’; ‘The feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface.’ The coincidence ...”

“... emptied, feeling your approvaland then running on, the big fleet Yoko,my body in its excellent black coat never lets me down,returning to you (as I always will, you know that)and nowfilling myself out with myself, no longer confused …Gunn was more than capable of beautifully devised bits of syntactical engineering, but these lines have no syntactical ...”

“... president to giggles from the audience, ‘tonight I’ve come dressed in my usual work clothes: black dinner jacket and the signature James Bond Omega watch.’Less than a week later, Steele was denounced as a ‘reputation-mauler for hire’ and faced the prospect of ruinous legal action over allegedly feeding an MP knowingly false claims that a British ...”