“... Ginsberg). Travel is another instance, and when Koch writes about his experiences in Sweden as a young man, his amusing and unassuming manner turns towards the world: The only thing I could say in Swedish Was ‘Yog talar endast svenska’ Which meant I speak only Swedish, whereas I thought it meant I DON’T speak Swedish. So the ...”

“... with Hays and, after her, with the sculptor Emma Stebbins, but a long secret affair with a young woman who married her adopted son, thus becoming her daughter-in-law. This ‘matrilineal, incestuous, adulterous, polygamous, homosexual household’, as Sharon Marcus describes it in Between Women, was not, however, ‘branded as deviant’. Cushman was ...”

“... state and the character of social relations. Should assets be transferred from rich to poor, from young to old, or simply across an individual’s own life? Should the solutions and institutions be private or public? Should the cost be covered by compulsory taxes or left to private initiatives, possibly encouraged by tax incentives? At one extreme are systems ...”

“... novels, far fewer imagine themselves as middle-aged. In Britain between the wars a respectable young lady, dependent on her father for an allowance, had limited options. She expected and was expected to marry. A graduate might find professional employment, but the marriage bar stymied careers in many areas, including teaching and the civil ...”

“... the Taliban’s Kandahar heartland with a colleague from the New York Times. We had seen wide-eyed young Taliban fighters in Kabul, like peasant boys parachuted into Gomorrah, rip cassettes out of car stereos and stride into hospitals to order female doctors home and men to grow beards. Now we wanted to meet the ideologues who had launched the movement. We ...”

“... outstripped anyone’s claim to possess their own story. Here he is writing to his oldest friend, David Peltz, who is thinly fictionalised as Woody Selbst in the story ‘A Silver Dish’ and as George Swiebel in Humboldt’s Gift. ‘What matters,’ Bellow wrote to Peltz when he complained of being used, is that good things get written … We’ve known ...”

“... innocence of childhood; and have great mountain tumults and sonorities in adolescence and young manhood; and afterwards there are the slow fertile turnings of maturity, when the river becomes ever deeper and wider; until at last it empties itself into the bitter immensity of death, the ocean of the end? And by an extension of the metaphor, the river ...”

“... one recent front-page story says. ‘The midwives were caring, fulfilled and passionate,’ a young journalist writes about her decision to retrain. People look to their jobs for so much that’s not written into any contract: self-respect, stability, social standing. Work is ‘a road’, as Richard Sennett once wrote, ‘to the unification of the ...”

“... to City Limits as part of a strategy to get herself a job at the Guardian, then in the designer David Hillman’s font-butting, G2-adding incarnation: she loved the Guardian intimately, like a lover, the way it cropped its pictures, its Garamond and Helvetica and heavy rules. I, on the other hand, was completely clueless. Between Deborah and Nick ...”

“... tough keeping track of all the debutantes promenading into print and creating a stir: Donna Tartt, David Leavitt, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, Susan Minot, Mary Robison, Anderson Ferrell – a cast of dozens. Many of those rookies trained at the literary dojo of the author, editor, creative writing teacher and guru-mentor-mindgamer ...”

“... draped Art Deco dryads, fishbowl lights and heavy velvet curtains. The set was screaming for a David Lynch remake of The Masque of the Red Death. Room Three, Hotel Esperance, Finistère: a beacon of hope at the end of a darkening continent. But something embedded layers deep, mephitic and beyond redemption, was present in this city. All the coded signs ...”

“... not the central figure, whether or not he has been hit by ” an arrow. This view was dismissed by David Wilson in his superb colour facsimile of 1985. It turns out, however, that the scene as we know it is the result of a restoration in the earlier 19th century. The areas in which work was done included, crucially, the flights on the end of the missile in or ...”

“... true when we are trying to untangle humanity’s relationship with the natural environment,’ David Blackbourn writes, in this magnificently compelling, vivid and often pioneering book. Its subject is Germany’s struggle to subjugate its landscape, above all its waters, over the last 250 years. But its implications apply to the contemporary world, to the ...”

“... mentioned by Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of ...”

“... jazz/blues record – Bessie Smith’s classic ‘St Louis Blues’ from 1925, which featured a young Louis Armstrong playing cornet.This collision of models meant that Tippett’s music tended to develop through rupture and disjoint: the idea of combining disparate strands to form a neatly arranged whole never appealed to him. The English musical ...”