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“... the culture of the street: ‘Only the most tenuous of connections between us, looks on a street corner by strangers, a gesture of mutual respect based on our being young, black, male, based, in other words, on our being “brothers”.’ Not so brotherly now. Julius finds only distorted reflections of himself in his passport, since the first name on it ...”

“... daughter, Virginia, killed at the age of five by a truck while riding her tricycle past the corner gas station. He adds: ‘I felt an ultimate security, full licence and a horrible unforgettable boundary-less love. It ruined me and it made me.’ For this contaminated and contaminating love, Springsteen writes, ‘I abandoned my parents, my sister, and ...”

“... a Jesuit palaeontologist, is questioning Saint-Denis, the French colonial administrator of this corner of Chad. Tassin is looking for information about a mysterious figure called Morel, whose recent activities have scandalised all of French Equatorial Africa. Saint-Denis begins to recount lengthy conversations he had with people who recounted to him other ...”

“... all this, it is hardly surprising to learn from the acknowledgments that he has been talking to Paul Auster, whose recent Oracle Night treats with some of the same topics. The Road to Delphi is very much Auster territory, emphasising the uncanny effects you can produce when you play Escheresque games with time and narrative, when the fuzzy prospect of an ...”

“... a crisis in historiography. ‘Monographism has taken over academic history and confined it to a corner of our culture where professors write books for other professors and review them in journals restricted to members of the profession.’ With some alarm he noted that ‘the disease must have infected me, for there I was, a former police reporter on the ...”

“... clearly signals hubris, since we know that there was to be more than one nasty surprise around the corner. The General Theory abruptly ceased to be compared with Newton’s Principia or Darwin’s Origin, those revolutionary texts generated by illustrious Cambridge predecessors. Instead, its scientific status came to seem comparable with that of an equally ...”

“... reduced a thriving forest-dwelling Indian population to beggary and degradation, the men street-corner drunks, their female children prostituted on the streets of Asuncion. In the case of the few tribes not already in touch with civilizados the first contact may be seen as an augury: missionaries bring medicine, but they also bring disease, disease to which ...”

“... with the Chinaman lasted almost two years. After the popular romances of Delly and the novels of Paul Bourget, Marguerite delved into Shakespeare and Molière. Her biographer suggests that the ‘purity’ of her style derives from her study of Madame de Lafayette and Racine, but this is hard to reconcile with the alleged influence of Bataille and ...”

“... exciting and illuminating juxtaposition between Jagger’s relief, No Man’s Land (1919-20), and Paul Nash’s Totes Meer (1940-41). It may be relevant that the theme is concrete for once. A lot more light will be thrown on the problem now that the Tate at Bankside has opened its doors and we start to see what the curators there have been able to do with the ...”

“... Take an old tram ticket, he suggests by way of example, ‘cut a square from its right-hand corner and you have an i-drawing.’ ‘This describes the discovery of an artistic structure in the non-artistic world and the creation of an artwork from this structure through delimitation alone.’ An ‘i’ composition is collage at its purest, a simple cut ...”

“... index was measured in units that corresponded to the rate of heat loss; one of the geographers, Paul Siple, later regretted this, as the use of units was often taken to imply that the index was an alternative temperature scale. This past winter a US-Canadian team unveiled a new wind chill index without the Celsius figure attached. In time, those numbers ...”

“... in which the truth can no longer be portrayed directly but can only be squinted at out of the corner of one’s eye, grasped only by bouncing one proposition against its opposite. Perhaps this is what Adorno had in mind when he called art a negative image of reality. Beckett’s language, which manages like some wounded animal to drag itself along when it ...”

“... pursued. Then I got twitchy when I read the petition written by Bernard-Henri Lévy, and signed by Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, William Shawcross, Claude Lanzmann, Salman Rushdie, Mike Nichols, Neil Jordan, and, to bring up the female numbers, Diane von Furstenberg, the Isabelles Adjani and Huppert, Yamani Benguigui, Danièle Thompson and Arielle Dombasle. It ...”

“... of that lifesize howitzer by Charles Sergeant Jagger on the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner. Arranged on obelisks are squadrons of engineless planes that will never achieve flight. Granite battleships hide in alcoves. Ghost armies perch on temporary plinths in a psychosexual romance of heavy cloaks, gas masks, boots and belts. I think of Walter ...”

“... the bag so hard he’d knocked it off its chain. Between bouts of writing, he retreated to a corner chair to smoke and to listen to his characters.Marion McClinton, the director of his later plays, called Wilson ‘the heavyweight champion’. He was referring to his great undertaking, but with his large forehead, broad chest and heavy-set frame Wilson ...”