“... There is a great difference between trying to figure out what a poem means and trying to figure out which interpretation of a poem will contribute to the toppling of patriarchy or to the war effort. Until recently the assertion of this difference would have been superfluous, but in many circles it has come to be an article of faith that the idea of a distinctively literary system of facts and values is at best an illusion and at worst an imposition by the powers that be of an orthodoxy designed to suppress dissent ...”

“... the Paris Review, McSweeney’s and the New Yorker. He is also a journalist, specialising, like David Foster Wallace, in first-person-singular expeditions into curious reaches of American culture. Tower’s non-fiction adventures have included a bicycle odyssey along the New Orleans levee a year after Hurricane Katrina, a search for a possibly extinct ...”

“... conversation with a senior cabinet member who has decided not to contest the election, which means he will have to stand down come the reshuffle in a few weeks. ‘I’m in a job I love,’ he says, ‘but I can’t go on.’ He added: ‘Forcing Tony Blair out was the stupidest thing we ever did.’  Whole place sunk in gloom. Pleasure at the latest ...”

“... of deadly pounces – is frequently deployed in an unsisterly manner. Take The Girls of Slender Means (1963): Dorothy’s hips were 36 and a half inches; her bust measurement was only 31, a fact which did not dismay her, as she intended to marry one of three young men out of her extensive acquaintance who happened to find themselves drawn to boyish ...”

“... for GP training to more than eight for neurosurgery. Some programmes are ‘run-through’, which means you start straight away, but most require two more years of core training (another four or six placements) before you apply for jobs as a registrar. You can be well into your thirties before becoming a consultant, even later if research breaks and parental ...”

“... which sets an outer limit on the right to life. Lethal aggressors who cannot be stopped by lesser means are liable to lethal attack, and this does not violate their right to life so long as they remain a threat. Killing in self-defence is distinct from execution, the killing of someone who is no longer a threat as a punishment for past conduct. It is also ...”

“... message to CIA agents that ‘the most important thing is to avoid false positives … even if it means a few true positives slip through.’ He made the same argument a few years earlier to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: ‘With regard to counterterrorism operations in general, and the el-Masri matter in particular … the scale tips decisively ...”

“... law generally prevails over democratic discontent in spite of adverse electoral consequences. David Cameron must have looked on in envy: he’d tried to talk tough on immigration without any authority to reduce Britain’s openness to southern Europeans. Merkel meanwhile profited from continuing to talk up German openness while having ensured that Germany ...”

“... on a stock image developed over centuries, by painters especially. Brueghel in the 16th century, David Teniers in the 17th, and Joseph Wright in the 18th, all painted grimy scenes of reclusion and penury, with hints of mad obsession and radiant wonder. Cornelis Pietersz Bega’s alchemist, from 1663, adds pathos to the mix: were it not for the delicately ...”

“... is one source for the Hanged Man tarot card. All these examples attest to what the art historian David Freedberg calls ‘the power of images’, which more puritanical critics might see as fetishism writ large. ‘To be adored or punished, to be welcomed, dreaded, or expelled,’ Heller-Roazen concludes, ‘the image of the absentee is each time ...”

“... and its immobilisation in infrastructure – a ‘spatial fix’, in the words of the geographer David Harvey – is one progenitor of Xi’s grand initiative. China’s treatment by the US is another.In October 2011, Obama’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced the birth of ‘America’s Pacific Century’ in an article for Foreign ...”

“... Half Has Never Been Told, Edward Baptist has identified this ‘whipping system’ as a pervasive means of increasing the productivity of labour in the cotton fields.* But neither of Cameron’s holdings resembled the ultra-efficient and immensely profitable enterprises Baptist claims cotton plantations had become by the mid-19th century. More often than ...”

“... and Marcello is teaching Anna how to be bored ‘in a certain way. Like brilliantly.’ That means taking his red pencil to phrases such as ‘penetratingly difficult’, but letting ‘eerily symbolic’ survive. (Barthelme’s biographer, Tracy Daugherty, points out that in the same issue as ‘L’Lapse’, a reviewer can be found complaining that ...”

“... I read Summers that the FBI had an ‘alternative’ black leader they wished to emplace by these means. It was Samuel Pierce, later to be Ronald Reagan’s ultra-corrupt Secretary for Housing and Urban Development, greeted by the sinister cretin Reagan on one occasion with the salute (to the only black member of his own Cabinet): ‘And how are things in ...”

“... to read them as a tribute to their recipient, especially since the nature of the collection means that Ginsberg fails, unusually, to get a word in edgeways. Ginsberg was noisier and altogether more generous than Burroughs. He was a better scholarly bricoleur and indulged a more systematic passion for reading. He attended at length to the careers of ...”