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“... voice is distressed and vulnerable, the sentences winding and riddled with commas. According to Martin Aitken, who has sensitively translated four of her books, Ørstavik describes the prose in the new novel as ‘precarious’. The narrator is afraid to slow down; she isn’t bothered about ‘well-formed syntax, conventions of punctuation or elegance ...”

“... A well-known writer came over. We said hello, I was embarrassed, I knew he didn’t like what I wrote. He had mentioned this once and been ironic, which made this even harder. But he didn’t want to say just hello and congratulate me, he wanted to talk, and he spent at least five minutes refining his attitude to me and my books, he couldn’t say straight out that he didn’t like them, that they were bad in other words, but nor could he not say that, so what came out of his mouth was impossible to grasp because I didn’t understand the basis ...”

“... Imight have​ met him once. In September 2015 I flew to Norway for a literary festival. Knausgaard was the headliner, but he cancelled at the last minute and was replaced by an Elvis impersonator. Instead of pictures of Karl Ove smoking the cigarette of the camera down to its smouldering butt-end, the newspaper coverage of the event included photographs of a pastorally beefy Elvis in a white rhinestone jumpsuit, gazing through dark glasses into the bright sun ...”

“... to remember how it started. Dial M for Murdoch is an invaluable account of its evolution, told by Martin Hickman of the Independent, and the MP Tom Watson. Watson has been particularly close to events. In September 2006, he spearheaded opposition within the Labour Party to Tony Blair’s refusal to schedule his departure from office. Since Blair enjoyed ...”

“... have sampled car doors slamming, Eastern tablas, disco bass-lines, astronauts talking to NASA, Martin Luther King’s speeches and Donny Osmond singing ‘Someone Help Me’. And, thanks to an Akai S900 sampler (cost price around £2000), the KLF’s album Chill Out includes the sound of sheep baaing. The KLF (or the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, as they ...”

“... had already attempted to colonise the fringes of Scottish Gaeldom with civilising Lowlanders, as Martin MacGregor’s essay in the collection edited by Eamonn O Ciardha and Micheál O Siochrú makes clear. From Giraldus Cambrensis to the chronicler John of Fordun, medieval commentators from Britain had demonised the Gaels for their barbarous ways. Such ...”

“... as usual, on the blink. Abba provided the foundation for the emergent synth-pop scene, from Stock Aitken Waterman’s hit factory to the Human League’s reincarnation as ‘an art Abba with the men wearing make-up’, as their keyboardist and guitarist, Jo Callis, put it. In the wake of punk, Gradvall points out, Abba and new wave were ‘aesthetically ...”

“... to whom all sorts of rumour could be attributed, a twisted figment of the public’s imagination. Martin Doherty makes it clear in Nazi Wireless Propaganda (2000) that outbreaks of Haw-Haw scare stories recurred throughout the war, at moments of maximum stress: after the defeats of 1942, during the air-raids of that year, and with the first use of flying ...”

“... what might be conjured through carefully stacked or mingled tones is what their producer, George Martin, gave them. Martin’s own sense of sonic possibility was honed through the bafflingly eclectic series of projects that made up his EMI apprenticeship: from Flanders and Swann to Nellie the Elephant, from the Vipers ...”