“... and crabbed at the nearby dock in Waldport. My friend Charlie Vermont, a poet, introduced me to David Shetzline and his wife, M.F. Beal, both writers, who lived up the road from us in a place called Beavercreek. We got into some swinging scenes, did some major acid, talked about the world. Shetzline had been a student with Thomas Pynchon at Cornell in the ...”

“... sense of humour sometimes surfaces (‘Senilità grew out of an affair Svevo had in 1891-92 with a young woman of, as one of his commentators delicately puts it, indeterminate profession, later to become a circus equestrienne’); it can also be detected here and there in Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005). But it was still surprising that comedy ...”

“... allowed to escape would consist of those best-equipped to build up the state of Israel – the young, the strong, the rich. Secondly, believing the Nazi persecution was conclusive evidence that assimilation of Jews by Gentiles would never succeed, they campaigned to prevent Jews emigrating to any country other than Israel on the grounds that it would ...”

“... colleagues. They were horrified by the progress of philosophical scepticism, exemplified by David Hume, which they saw as corroding the foundations of Christian faith. Reid, in An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense of 1764, argued in response that ‘there are certain principles … which the constitution of our nature leads ...”

“... was irrelevant; all that mattered was content flow. Evan Spiegel, the impossibly rich, impossibly young-looking co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc. (formerly Snapchat) was there in person. He talked about augmented reality and what his company was doing for young people’s mental health with the air of being barely present ...”

“... published by a Mormon press, it has a distinctly Mormon slant. Givens is a graduate of Brigham Young University, the private college owned and operated by the Mormon Church. He makes no mention of his religious affiliation – perhaps on the assumption that knowledge of his Mormon background would cast doubt on his meticulous scholarship. It ...”

“... banned groups advocating for an Islamic caliphate in the country.In his new book, Revolusi, David Van Reybrouck puts the creation of the republic at the centre of the story. Indonesia was the first country to declare independence in the wake of the Second World War, shortly after the surrender of Japan, which had occupied what was then known as the ...”

“... When a young man who has thrust himself to the centre of the political stage writes a book on politics, he will suffer the condescension of his seniors, the condemnation of his critics, and the faint sniggers of academics offstage. David Owen has had his prescription for Britain patronised by Grimond and Powell, dissected by Ken Coates, and treated like a first-year undergraduate’s essay by Professor Peter Townsend ...”

“... it in a well-marked tradition in British philosophy. Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, another young man’s book, is its greatest precursor, and the theme was carried on by Mill and Russell. In Russell’s work it was associated with a theory of meaning, and Ayer’s contribution was to weave into this pattern the philosophy of language which the Vienna ...”

“... the heroine, Joan Ogden, who has grown miserably old in a small provincial town, overhears two young women discussing her. She recognises them as women of the same ‘type’ as her: unattached, independent, sexually ambiguous. They dress like her, and wear their hair cut in a similar style. But they seem to inhabit a different world: their lamps have very ...”

“... works in whose future Weill himself seemed at all interested during his last years. Unlike the young Leonard Bernstein, who was then his closest rival among the ‘classically’-trained composers working on Broadway, the Weill of 1950 had long since severed his links with the world of serious music. As far as he was concerned – if his public ...”

“... but himself. If he is in earnest – and if he isn’t we’ll not bother with him, any more than David Trotter does – he thought that he was testing his society by moving out to the periphery of that society, speaking for and with the disaffected, the vagabonds, the ill-adjusted. How disconcerting, then, to find that the disaffection he thought he was ...”

“... present instalment, Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, covers the narrow gap from 1957 to 1959. David Kynaston tells the story in his own measured words, and he also tells it in the often loud and uninhibited words of others – authors, newspapers, diarists, eminent politicians, Mass Observation respondents. Man, it seems, is an indignant animal. Kynaston ...”

“... the cannon and the firing-squad against the drawing-room and the kitchen stove. At the end of David Pownall’s book the protagonist and his confidant are shot. At the end of John Hearne’s the leading characters have been respectively drowned, decapitated and disembowelled, and the hero is about to be hanged. Ann Schlee’s story ends with her heroine ...”

“... and John Gribbin intimate, Hawking seems to have been a listless student and a rather charmless young man before ALS struck, obviously intelligent but lacking any passion to use his intelligence in one direction rather than another. Thus arises the idea that it was Hawking’s disease, and his fight against it, that gave him some intellectual ...”