“... seduction, sculpted leisure courts, performance atria, competitive cocktails. Offshore investors may not deliver the homes promised to struggling Londoners, but they do have the latest baths, pools, showers and en suite facilities. Seen from across the river, from Vauxhall Bridge on a winter’s evening, or from one of those dazzling and cleaned up aerial ...”

“... When we justify plans to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, we often say that this may reduce our current levels of wellbeing, but it will make the lives of our descendants much better than they otherwise would have been, by preventing reductions in their wellbeing that we would otherwise be responsible for. But which people’s lives would ...”

“... in Map Five. The map of Israel’s ‘Final status’ proposals for the West Bank put forward in May 2000 are shown in Map Six. All maps were provided by the Foundation for Middle East Peace, Washington.]On 29 September, the day after Ariel Sharon, guarded by about a thousand Israeli police and soldiers strode into Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif (the ‘Noble ...”

“... the poet drifts morosely into the evening / which never satisfies him, while sober, / but which may offer the chance to write “about” it.’ Doctored autobiography will no longer be exploited. The ‘I’ of these anorexic pamphlets will be replaced by the avuncular ‘we’ of the biographies. (It’s like a small private company being floated on the ...”

“... is classified ‘B’, meaning ‘no reason not to murder immediately’. Two weeks later, on 15 May 1944, he was one of 878 able-bodied men on Convoy 73, the only one of 79 convoys with no women or children, and the only one not headed for Auschwitz. It went to Kaunas in Lithuania. It is thought that the men were assigned to dig up and burn the bodies of ...”

“... familiar social world but a self-contained realm of grotesque emblems.’ However much the novel may reveal about police brutality and racism, Wright thought of it as a novel of ideas rather than a book about racial injustice: as he told his agent, it was ‘the first time I’ve really tried to step beyond the straight black-white stuff’.Daniels is a ...”

“... victim to ethnic partisanship. A few years later, Howe hinted that the fury of the Jewish response may have been caused by residual guilt over how little American Jews had done, or even known, during the Holocaust. It was a brutal moment.The Arendt dispute was illuminating, but it also suggested an infusion of guilt into PR’s consideration of large social ...”

“... of Castro, not all of them literary, will be known in full only after his demise, whenever that may be. Then people not only in England but everywhere, those of the Right as well as those of the Left, will know the true nature of the regime led by a man of infinite cunning and deceit, a beastly power-hungry egomaniac who is the bearded white double of ...”

“... mothers are an essential item of equipment in any psyche, and that though relations with mothers may be difficult or even dreadful, attachment to them is mandatory. They also know, as a corollary, that a denial of attachment is a failure to confront the reality of mother-attachment.‘You must find it very disturbing.’‘No, I find it ...”

“... he answered, ‘there is an office, a place in the city centre, where the destitute may queue for their Social Security. You might queue all day. And the next day. And the next day. And so on. After you have waited there ten hours, the clerk will close the window in your face and tell you to come back the day after tomorrow. He wants to go for ...”

“... of the 19th-century university, that these new forms of learning were first sought and found. It may be significant that it was only after the war that young men, back from the trenches, could fight an enclosed pedantry with a full heart and vigour. They could even, like Tillyard, in the significant and contradictory language of the exclusion, talk of ‘the ...”

“... motives, no knowledge of the terrain or language and no regard for civilian life? One reason may be that the government was worried about the potential number of casualties. But casualties were inevitable: by the end of the war, five hundred Syrian mercenaries had been killed compared to nearly three thousand Azerbaijanis. Was the damage inflicted on ...”

“... to work as skilled labourers (he described apartheid as ‘good neighbourliness’). Not until May 2015, in response to the #RhodesMustFall student protests, was a large plaque honouring him removed from the campus at Stellenbosch. It is Stellenbosch University to which Gobodo-Madikizela’s centre for Historical Trauma and Transformation has recently ...”

“... the merits of Mitchell’s translation. On matters of taste there is no disputing, and some may even find it inspiring that his ‘poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music’: this is a misrepresentation in any case, since except for rare vulgarities such as a ‘son of a bitch’ Agamemnon, and a profusion of added adjectives (‘naked ...”

“... inspector investigating a murder that has not yet taken place: he ends up killing the suspect, who may be his father. The critic Jean Cayrol read Les Gommes as an allegory about the German occupation and the French Resistance: ‘sadly,’ Robbe-Grillet later wrote, ‘I had been on the other side.’ Les Gommes won the Prix Fénéon and the admiration of ...”