“... you were doing. Suddenly kids with nothing else going for them could be the entitled ones. One may dislike snotty narcissism, while arguing that at least this way it was an equal opportunity sport. The music of the New Romantic aspirants became the popular soundtrack to Thatcher’s Britain – ‘You’re indestructible, always believing’ – but that ...”

“... of IS making a comeback in Syria? All sides, Syrian and foreign, say they are against IS but they may privately calculate that its total elimination is not in their interests. ‘I met many people in Raqqa and Deir Ezzor this week,’ someone who frequently travels to both places says, ‘who are upset because they say the SDF is trying to keep the fight ...”

“... liberal Democrat, ‘he would no longer be our chief of police.’ Last year’s protests in LA may be seen by future historians as part of an ongoing radical tradition. But the change in LA that began in the 1960s has only gone so ...”

“... other people’s reaction to violence and death seemed a thrill worth seeking. Here, Whitman may not have sought out the despairing woman – but he still watches in ‘ecstasy’ and offers no comfort. Is this the Mystery, that the spectacle we like to watch is the misery of others? Whitman and Fuckhead are both voyeurs, responding to the purity of a ...”

“... company Illumina. He also registered with Washington Speakers Bureau (through which Theresa May has received more than £600,000 in speaking fees since the pandemic began). In August 2018, Cameron was hired by Greensill as a ‘part-time adviser’ and given share options worth as much as $70 million. Because it was more than two years since he had left ...”

“... march of paragraphs. (In her 2014 book on Hrabal, Monika Zgustová tells us that each year on 1 May, the holy day of Communism, he made a point of publicly emptying his latrine, a personal ritual whose loud stink interfered with the parp of official power. So much for marching, displays, parades.) Each sentence, chapter, book, is a sack being held open ...”

“... deeply reliable commercial optics, such that the destruction of Dolly Parton’s interestingness may be judged a solid success. In a way, he offers a compliment to real life by always allowing it to baffle art. No sentence, in the Patterson universe, is equal to the suggestions and nuances of life itself; his galaxy is a constant flow of words that drift ...”

“... by rejecting foreign products. When the Qianlong emperor wrote ‘we possess all things,’ he may have meant that long before Macartney arrived, the Qing emperors, aristocracy and the Chinese elites had already acquired the European goods they wanted: pocket watches, muskets, spectacles, magnifying glasses, telescopes, mechanical models of the solar ...”

“... entitled to the wealth of this land which they laboured to produce. The wealth of this land may not be appropriated from them. It neither belongs to the Englishman nor his Orangeman Carsonite lackey, nor his Green Tory lapdog in Dublin.’ For this occasion, she had adopted a brogue, which she kept up while speaking about her role as an ‘Irish freedom ...”

“... white girls to a ‘fraudulent love’ that is ‘a short stop to Shirley Temple’. Claudia may dismember her dolls but Morrison herself is not envious of her characters. They are not punished for the qualities she has given them. Pride does not always come before a fall. Beauty is not bestowed so it might be marred or destroyed. The people in her pages ...”

“... as Bergen, the second largest city in Norway. Asle 1 has been married just once and though there may have been a lapse in his drinking days with a woman called Guro (who also has a double, in the shape of Åsleik’s sister), he has shown no interest in women since Ales’s death; Asle 2 is also single but was twice married and divorced, first to Liv, then ...”

“... people’ to pass. Even if you find the apartment, you might not find Blam: he may have slipped out along the narrow walkway that crosses the roof, above ‘the abyss’ of Main Square. On the other hand, ‘if there were a search warrant out for him’ the mansard’s seclusion would ‘turn it into a trap’. If cornered he’d ...”

“... washed up at Preston in Sussex, Lady Shirley asked her steward to send them up to London ‘so we may drink it, which will end the dispute with the commissions of the customs’.When goods went missing it was always easy to blame the people who actually heaved them from the sea. Sir John Killigrew, who held the right to wrecks on the Lizard peninsula, faced ...”

“... year, later collected as Art and Society, he spelt this out: ‘The artistic process in general may be said to consist of two processes: the immediate and essential one which has always been known as inspiration, and which psychologically we describe as an access to the deeper layers of the unconscious; and a secondary process of elaboration, in which the ...”

“... Enright accepts that great art is ‘amoral, unleashing energies which do not stop short of, which may even seek out, gratuitous ferocities’. Davie’s criticisms are of course reflected everywhere in Enright’s poetry itself, most obviously in its anxieties about the impotence of the liberal humanist. In ‘A Liberal Lost’, from The Old Adam ...”