“... As dozens​ of lagoons of pig waste overflow in North Carolina, President Trump says that Hurricane Florence is ‘one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water’. (In North Carolina 9.7 million pigs produce ten billion gallons of manure a year.)*President Trump says: ‘I hope to be able to put this up as one of my crowning achievements that I was able to expose something that is truly a cancer in our country ...”

“... dark windows. Farrell’s folly seemed to be twinned with the other publishing conglomerate on the north side of the river: Random House. Marks modestly described his book as undernourished fiction, fiction buried beneath an excess of facts. It’s the first reflex of the con man, the bullshitter, to lay down a smokescreen of names, dates, addresses. Bore the ...”

“... or New Hampshire, which are ‘different’. I stifled the impulse to say that we were from the North and that the Confederacy was the enemy in the war we’d won, or that someone who wore the symbol of American white supremacy out in public perhaps deserved to ‘get jumped’. Though I’d read about Trump supporters shouting ‘Sieg heil!’ at his ...”

“... me in the East He fucked me in the West He fucked me South my cock in his mouth he fucked me North No sperm shot forth The dismaying thing about such verses as this one from ‘Love comes’ is the inadequacy of the language, the idea that a serious poem could ever be written in these terms. Ginsberg once rebuked the poet W.S. Merwin because, when ...”

“... vomiting blood from an internal haemorrhage. It was 1914. His father, then living in a small town north of Paris, was not in the Army, because he was Dutch by nationality, and suffered in any case from gastric ulcers. There was no one to tend him, since all the doctors and nurses had left the town; and so he died, coughing his life’s blood up into a china ...”

“... that it is the former who have written the novels which present the past to the common reader.’) John Mercury is an exciting tale about those men who, risking transportation and prison, smuggled on carts and mail coaches, then up and down the railways, batches of pamphlets, broadsheets, newsheets, all clandestinely printed or copied out by hand – the ...”

“... are also more than usually absurd. Look at those silly clips of Paddy Ashdown playing hopscotch or John Major on his knees in a day-nursery or Tony Blair in his Newcastle soccer-strip. Who do these people think they’re fooling? Why don’t they treat us as grown-ups? What’s happened to the issues? To this, the politicians might retort: where did those ...”

“... from the nature of tragedy and the philosophy of Unamuno to the Jacobin terror, the works of John Stuart Mill, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Though the author is a distinguished academic, it is not a conventional academic study. It is a personal statement, a cry from the heart. Perhaps because of this, it ...”

“... a dust-sheet over her first husband. Miss Edwards excellently takes it off. The second husband, John Marsh, was an advertising copywriter and a PR man. He read her epic carefully and, among many other things, took out the dashes. Gone with the Wind was written in a peculiar manner. It is, of course, very long, but epics are supposed to be. (Beckett’s ...”

“... Garden’, painted in 1939, in fact shows a wall with a garden behind it, while ‘Landscape in North Wales’ (1938) is dominated by the wooden fence in the foreground. Each of the ‘Gardens in the Pound, Cookham’ (1936) is the realisation of its owner’s private fancy, and each is scrupulously defended from adjacent gardens by an iron railing. The ...”

“... after 1500 have been sent to the Musée National de la Renaissance at the Château d’Écouen, north of Paris. Such drastic deaccessioning would have been disruptive for many museums, but at Cluny, where the va et vient of objects has been the norm, it has created more space and clarity for what remains. The collection is itself the product of centuries of ...”

“... characters, even to moralise – although he makes the remark when a composite figure called ‘John’ complains that the author is exploiting other people’s experiences: ‘I am owed.’ ‘You’re not . . . You’re like a . . . a cannibal or something.’ And owed, perhaps, as the book too often seems to assume, a sympathetic attitude to his ...”

“... father. Somewhere along the way the urge to write intervened and he enrolled at the University of North Carolina. ‘Lawford is one of those towns that people leave,’ Banks writes of the (fictive) setting of Affliction, ‘not one that people come back to.’ Yet he continually returns to those towns, if only to confirm the wisdom of getting away. His best ...”

“... Thomas was the son of Maronite Christian immigrants from Kahlil Gibran’s village, Becharre, in north Lebanon. His assimilation was so thorough that he took the Al Jolson role of cantor’s son in a 1952 remake of The Jazz Singer. On the show, it fell to Uncle Tannous to expose the Lebanese heart beating within the American persona of Thomas’s ...”

“... flight by hydrogen balloon in 1783 as ‘a sort of physical rapture’, and the American pioneer John Wise insisted that the experience ‘never fails to produce exhilaration … the mind is illuminated.’ Yet what goes up must come down: ballooning’s Achilles’ heel, the impossibility of setting one’s direction of travel, means that even the most ...”