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“... invisible bank’ of her computer. And a computer’s memory provides one of the focal points in Kurt Andersen’s novel, Turn of the Century, a fat compendium of contemporary attitudes to technology. The central character in the novel is George Mactier, a well-off, middle-aged New Yorker who is set apart from the ordinary difficulties of the city: ‘the ...”

“... what the American novel (for good or ill) so often seeks to be nowadays. David Foster Wallace and Kurt Anderson step aside: today’s big novel is the type of book which aims at bigness with the notion that all other big books are folded inside. The example is not War and Peace but the World Wide Web. The Corrections chimes with a hundred pop songs and ...”

“... it turns out there’s a person who still recalls him quite clearly, his stepsister, Annye C. Anderson, now 96. ‘First time I remember Brother Robert,’ she says in her memoir,he helped us move to Memphis from the country in 1929. My little legs couldn’t make it up the big staircase leading to our new house. I felt someone scoop me up and carry ...”

“... to grasp – and from Donald Spoto’s life of Lotte Lenya it seems that the music-theatre of Kurt Weill, for all the considerable prominence it gave to female performers, was run by the men too. The most surprising aspect of the biography is the discovery that Lenya, with her wonderful voice ‘an octave below laryngitis’, as she herself described ...”

“... up. Musicians had time to practise, artists improvised paintings and sculptures. The Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, after years of neglect, relished his captive audience: ‘His pièces de résistance, beyond doubt, were sculptures fashioned out of state remnants of porridge, which he assiduously collected from breakfast tables. They had the colour of Danish ...”

“... hundred thousand Tutsi died in the ensuing massacre. Measured by consequences, the culpability of Kurt Waldheim, exposed for concealing his service as a German intelligence officer in the Balkans, was puny by comparison. Annan remained quite unmoved, until it became too impolitic to deny any remorse. The extent of his contrition is summed up by all he would ...”

“... nor fixed. Her own relationships were almost exclusively with women; she lived with Thomasine Anderson from 1918 until Anderson’s death in 1940.Before her move into abstraction, af Klint, like Mondrian and Malevich, was a figurative painter. She made Post-Impressionist paintings of the Swedish landscape as well as ...”

“... bitter enemies in the Party from becoming important regional figures, like Biedenkopf (‘King Kurt’) in Saxony. The SPD has never allowed the same personalisation of authority. When it has been in power, the pattern has always been a diarchy – Brandt and Herbert Wehner, or Schmidt and Brandt – with the Chancellor flanked by a powerful and ...”

“... How can one give an adequate account of modern tennis without saying something about the Danes, Kurt Nielsen (a Wimbledon finalist) or Torben Ulrich? Nothing about the unheralded 1966 Wimbledon champion, Mañuel Santana, the Swedes, Sven Davidson and his predecessor (later Borg’s coach) the diabetic Lennart Bergelin? No references to the great Nicola ...”

“... trouble keeping track of his output: his theatre projects, his collaborations with composers like Kurt Weill and William Grant Still, his readings and lectures, his column for the Chicago Defender, his novels and short stories, his poems for children, his volumes of autobiography. A running theme of Hughes’s career was the quest for a bona fide Broadway hit ...”

“... and instincts. Yates’s expertise is in pain and humiliation. There are some early, Sherwood Anderson-inflected stories in which these feelings are sympathetically observed, but except for the occasional, isolated outbreak of mildness, the only alternatives the later work offers are agonising pain, numbing pain or pain shouldered with bitter irony. Which ...”