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“... I have a friend​ whose son was killed in a school shooting. A smallish school shooting. It took place seven years before Columbine got Americans used to the practice of not thinking about guns. To understand how it happened, my friend sought out surviving witnesses, the gun shop owner who sold the gun, the dean of the college where the shooting took place, and the shooter’s devastated parents ...”

“... Guapa​, a freewheeling and incendiary first novel by Saleem Haddad, is set in an Arab country familiar to many from the newspapers, even though its author won’t let us place it on a map. The son of a Lebanese-Palestinian father and an Iraqi-German mother, Haddad is himself a composite. His story takes place six months after Arab Spring-like protests have besieged the country’s capital ...”

“... In January 1990 I moved from New York to Calcutta to get married. Having never been to India, I came equipped with V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilisation and Geoffrey Moorhouse’s rather more upbeat and engaging Calcutta. My mother, arriving for the wedding, looked around and seemed to grasp things rather more directly. ‘You must really love him,’ she said ...”

“... Laura Riding, so Deborah Baker tells us, first emerged into the public world of books in 1924. She was 23 years old and living in Louisville with her husband, a history professor whom she met when he was her teacher at Cornell. One of the things that had attracted Lou Gottschalk to Laura Reichenthal, as Riding had then been called, was that she knew her Marx better than the other undergraduate ladies did ...”

“... this conviction that led Ginsberg to India in the first place. He was not alone. Nor is the story Deborah Baker tells in A Blue Hand – a story about the encounter between optimistic, postcolonial Bengalis and disillusioned American Beats – about Ginsberg alone. It is a dense little slice of bicultural history, collated from ...”

“... was big enough to offer all the three million-plus books in print. Two distributors, Ingram and Baker & Taylor, handled distribution for most American publishers: Bezos wouldn’t have to make separate deals with each publishing house. Books also came assigned with International Standard Book Numbers and were catalogued on CD-ROM: that would save time, and ...”

“... or strange placenames. The vast majority of users of ancestry.co.uk are family historians, who, as Deborah Cohen observes in Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain (2013), are keen to make an ‘intimate discovery’ that will offer a connection with the dead and at the same time affirm their own ...”

“... she met the person she would later refer to as her ‘wife’, and also as ‘the monster’. Ida Baker, just a few months older, was a ‘colonial’ too: her family was from Suffolk, but she’d spent the first years of her life in Burma, where her father, an expert in tropical diseases, had been a doctor in the Indian army. She was taller than the other ...”

“... tree to escape the debris but was overwhelmed all the same; the bread just put into the oven by a baker who must obstinately have continued to work right up to the end. Yet overall what survives is emphatically not a frozen moment in the life of a community going about its normal business, but the traces of a city abandoned and already half-stripped. Hence ...”