“... 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 ...”

“... We explored the territory together: the Bow Quarter development conjured from the Bryant & May match factory, the weaver’s garret occupied by David Rodinsky above a decommissioned synagogue in Princelet Street, and the first speculative (and doomed) ‘Montmartre meets Montserrat’ restaurant on Dalston Lane. Wright managed to get an entire book out ...”

“... with London, Liverpool, Hull, Southampton or nearby Coventry; it is one of the few places where it may be genuinely true that more of the built fabric was destroyed by ‘the planners’ than the Luftwaffe.The demiurge of Birmingham’s rebuilding wasn’t a planner at all, but the city’s chief engineer between 1935 and 1963, Herbert Manzoni. Distrustful of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the director with ‘the occult touch’, that neglected giant etc etc etc. But stay, you may ask, how can a dead man, no matter how occult his touch, be the object of a quest? Aha! In that clifftop house he’d left a widow, she who was a legend in her own right. He had been her ultimate husband. First (silent movies) she’d hitched up with an ...”

“... to Senior Persons carrying out their professional responsibilities in a reckless manner, which may carry a prison sentence.’ This, as it was probably intended to, translated into tabloidese as ‘Jail Bad Bankers.’ These proposals would, I suspect, concentrate the minds of senior bankers if they became law. But that is quite a big ‘if’. Human ...”

“... could they be sure that a bullet would not – counter-productively – actually kill him? A clue may lie in the embarrassed admission of Chen’s security detail that, supposedly because it was a hot day, he was not wearing a bullet-proof vest, standard issue for a presidential incumbent on the campaign trail. An odd feature of the shooting was that aim was ...”

“... reform programme got going, and speculates, plausibly in my view, that the North’s leaders may have been ‘lulled by the evidence of their successes’. In any case, within a very few years North Korea fell irrevocably behind. It happens that Martin and I were each given our first, closely chaperoned tour by the same person – Kim Jong-su. He ...”

“... for believers, who can identify with the ‘terrifying joy’ it communicates. That may be true. But for the rest of us, Messiaen is not so much a messenger of the Word as a man whose faith led him to the furthest reaches of sound. And it is precisely the ‘bewildering’, violent, ecstatic nature of his music – the freedom of imagination he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... progeny who survived the Holocaust in Poland? (The number of Jews remaining today in Poland, which may be as high as ten thousand, depends on how one counts those who were converted to Catholicism as children during the war or in other ways lost their Jewish identity and have now reclaimed it.) Yes, the reply might go, this is not a result of Polish ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... held high! We are not ... If we persist as we are, who knows whether, a century from now, the time may have come to erase the word ‘Russian’ from the dictionary? ... We must build a moral Russia, or no Russia at all. Solzhenitsyn would have been better advised to follow Brodsky’s example. He has become yet another object of derision for the young, while ...”