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“... the prospective reader – not intended for gossip or virtuosic displays of wit. Rather, it was a means to keep him on track, a kind of corrective through self-scrutiny. This examination was sometimes scathing. In November 1888, he wrote:Your head has an odd shape, as if sculpted with great strokes of the chisel, almost like a man of genius. Your brow catches ...”

“... neck’ (Roger Shattuck); ‘Sun neck cut’ (Beverley Bie Brahic); ‘Let the sun beheaded be’ (David Lehman); ‘Sun sundered head’ (Martin Sorrell); ‘Sun throat cut’ (Ron Padgett). The compression of this lurid image of the dawn must have greatly appealed to Beckett; indeed his streamlined version possibly takes its cue from the phrase, for it ...”

“... in the great theatre of belonging. In the United States, to stay is an end in itself and not a means: to stay is the founding myth of this society.’ Over time, the stories of the children she interviews form one larger story. The majority of the children are escaping gang violence. Someone begins following them home from school, or leaving threatening ...”

“... Architectural​ plans are often issued with the instruction: ‘build to match existing.’ It means what it says: make something new look like what is – or was – already there. Build to match the existing kitchen cabinets. Build to match the existing decking. Build to match what remains of the house after the roof and the dining room wall were ripped off during Hurricane Laura, one of the strongest to have made landfall in Louisiana ...”

“... about the ‘true’ writings of Karl Ove Knausgaard, or the huge amount of attention paid to David Shields’s polemic Reality Hunger. Time and again we hear about a new desire for the real, about a realism which is realistic set against an avant-garde which isn’t, and so on. It’s disheartening that such simplistic oppositions are still being put ...”

“... had been subverted by blogs, satellite phones and even the mobile phone; YouTube provided the means to expose in the most graphic and immediate way the crimes and violence of security forces. In March 2011 mass arrests and torture effortlessly crushed the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain. Innovations in information technology may have changed the odds ...”

“... leave his desk, and that from now on he would be ‘editor emeritus’, adding that ‘“e” means you’re out, and “meritus” means you deserve it.’ Sometimes it’s possible to warm to the old monster. While it took Evans a long time to get over his sacking, he has by now come to terms with the man who sacked ...”

“... The book reveals that the army had an official expression for its behaviour: mitzuy ishur, which means ‘eliciting authorisation’. In an interview late in his life, Dayan described Israel’s tactics against Syria as constant ‘provocation’. Needless to say, Dayan himself had become a hero in the 1950s for acting in exactly this way. A similar pattern ...”

“... well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of these writers – however popular or influential, however frequently their writing appeared in the Paris Review or Conjunctions or the year-end Best American and Pushcart anthologies – managed to stir him. The ‘tone of mandarin ...”

“... reappear wearing little more than a ‘black lace underthing’, Moses H. reflects on ‘what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organised power . . . After the late failure of radical hopes.’ And Saturday turns out to be a soliloquising novel of urban experience in a similar ...”

“... on existentialism and phenomenology edited by R.D. Laing, complete with a eulogistic preface by David Cooper (the South African-born psychiatrist who coined the term ‘anti-psychiatry’). But readers who have to rely on an English translation have had to wait almost four decades to get their hands on a complete version. In important respects the new ...”

“... Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but embarrassingly arch greeting to David Livingstone when he ‘found’ him in Ujiji in November 1871 – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – as well as for his silly ‘Stanley cap’ (like a chamberpot with holes and a tea-towel flapping at the sides), he has always been every historian’s ...”

“... what’s the difference?’) This inarticulateness seems to create a need for other means of resolving conflict, so that once I caught myself thinking that if these Americans speak English like a second language, perhaps guns were their first language. A steady diet of television’s sentence fragments doesn’t help: complex thoughts require ...”

“... are not variable confessions but different worlds, and different instruments of understanding. David Kepesh in The Dying Animal offers a strong sidelight on Roth in The Plot against America, a comic view of liberty and nation which darkens and widens in the new novel. Kepesh, divorced and determined never to make the mistake of marriage again, takes true ...”

“... from recent prods to produce work of greater scope. In The History Manifesto (2014), Jo Guldi and David Armitage worry that the production of scholarly miniatures disqualifies historians from contributing to urgent cultural and political discussions – about climate change, sustainable production, international governance etc – in which the longue durée ...”