“... American literature, while his effect on popular culture has been incalculable. It may be comforting to some arbiters of aesthetic fashion to write Burroughs off as a perennial enthusiasm of ‘the young’, but they might consider that several generations of these young have since occupied key positions in film, TV, the recording business and ...”

“... and recovery from the bloodiest confrontation of the 19th century, in which the death toll may have been as high as forty million, forced the process of decentralisation to continue. The governors who had been specially empowered by the imperial court to fight the rebels were political ancestors of the infamous ‘warlords’ of the early 20th ...”

“... so I didn’t go online. I feared that everyone would have access to my unpublished fiction. This may seem odd since I already believed that every person I met could read my mind. One of the other side effects of Clozapine is constipation. My GP prescribed two laxatives. This just exacerbated the encopresis. My co-ordination started to go. I no longer felt ...”

“... in its ecstasy, which all children have when confronted with something new, whatever it may be, face or landscape, light, gilding, colours, watered silk. Or breakfast cereal. Or a new pair of tracksuit bottoms. Or a rubbish dump. Or Norwegian housing estates. Baudelaire’s examples of ‘whatever’ are rather too fine for Knausgaard. Baudelaire ...”

“... surpassed Britain’s by the early 20th century, the City remained the financial centre: ‘It may be that hides and rabbit skins are being sold from Australia to New York,’ one merchant banker wrote in 1914, ‘or coffee from Brazil to Hamburg, or eggs and butter from Siberia to London, or herrings from Aberdeen to Russia, or machinery from England to ...”

“... But then almost the same might have been said of Mosul and Tikrit, where the insurgents may have had popular support but were always outnumbered and outgunned. Before they collapsed – four or five divisions have still not been re-formed – the Iraqi security services counted 350,000 soldiers and 650,000 police. They were opposed by an estimated ...”

“... that had just begun. Schlögel denies that the Terror contains its own narrative resolution: it may be possible to say what caused 1937, but it’s much harder to say what it brought into being. The bewildering fact is that it would soon be swamped in the national consciousness by a cataclysm whose death toll was perhaps ten times as high. Anything ...”

“... a panel of Commonwealth judges and lawyers noted in 2000, ‘We suggest that the Malaysian malaise may be due in no small measure to the gradual acceptance of a state of emergency as the norm of government.’ A state of emergency means a battery of statutes muzzling the media and restricting the right of assembly and free debate, in a society which is still ...”

“... told me about contemporary activism in Asturias, the legacy of the indignados’ uprising of May 2011 – the housing movement, for example, that has stopped evictions by Spain’s failed and bailed-out banks, and the squatted social centre where I met Amaya. There is a long tradition of militancy in Asturias, even down to the tactics and weapons used by ...”

“... mention Forster’s last great love, Bob Buckingham, a policeman he met in 1930, whose wife, May, not only agreed to share her husband but ended up nursing her rival on his deathbed (Forster died at the Buckinghams’ house in Coventry in 1970). Arctic Summer is largely concerned with dramatising the long gestation of A Passage to India, and it’s fair ...”

“... cage can give and more: she/he/it can be a human friend, a dream lover come to life with whom one may do as one wants – in every form of engagement, from tender care to sadistic self-pleasuring. A doll will not bite, will not let rip with her tongue. Rilke describes this ideal complicity in ‘On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel’, an impassioned and ...”

“... will appeal to you.’ Thayer wanted to be a poet, but editing turned out to be his vocation. In May 1920, he reported to Pound that he and Watson had already spent $60,000 on the Dial and expected to spend $40,000 more within the year (about $1.15 million today). The next year, he established the annual Dial Award; the first recipient was Anderson, followed ...”

“... the least on a journey from Big C to Big D (as everyone is, although the letter of the first stage may be different)? Why do I want so much to avoid the notion of a pilgrim progressing? What if I try it the other way? I’m standing still while the tests, diagnosis and treatments pass by me as if on a belt. This is not outlandish, the supermarket checkout, or ...”

“... decision on matters of personnel, foreign and armaments policy’. His power in domestic politics may have been undermined by the crises of the Eulenburg scandal of 1907-9 (when the homosexuality of some of those close to him was exposed by a liberal smear campaign) and the Daily Telegraph affair of 1908 (when his jejune remarks to a British journalist ...”

“... thank goodness. For the present, we’re more or less in trenches again – but movement orders may come at any moment. I’m writing this in an Observation Post in the outpost line on a comparatively peaceful and sunny morning. Love to Billie and the youngsters.All his life Lewis was a scribbler of verse, and the habit endured in France. He wrote a long ...”