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“... firecracker, because I have to identify myself with everyone in it, including the corpses, pal. John Berryman, Dream Song When we first meet him in The Sportswriter (1986), Frank Bascombe is 38 and trying to fend off the ‘dreaminess’ that has afflicted him since Ralph, his first son, died of Reye’s syndrome four years earlier. Now divorced from ...”

“... were warped in their image.‘Every Saturday night we had ballroom dancing in the great marble hall,’ said Caroline, ‘and the headmistress sat drumming her fingers, with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth and a glass of crème de menthe. We had to dance with her father, who’d been wounded as a sapper in the First World War: either he had his ...”

“... already routinely tackle Darwin’s day-to-day theorising through the crucial 1837-9 period. No Victorian’s daily thoughts have been picked over so precisely by a squad of scholars. So much is published that a managerial meta-industry is already springing up to collate and correlate. Yet the more esoteric these studies become, the easier it is to lose ...”

“... title for the forerunner to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘Stephen Hero’. Turpin is no hero to James Sharpe, who sets out to cut him down to size, just another ‘callous, brutal and violent’ criminal, an ‘unpleasant thug’, hardly distinguishable from so many others, so that when The Lives of Noted Highwaymen was published around 1750 he ...”

“... different from ours, except for the fact that they speak and have bodies. There can be no alien abductions, since any aliens who bothered to abduct us would not be aliens. UFOs, like utopias, are epiphanies of the beyond which bear witness to the fact that we can never attain it. The most mindbending of literary genres provide evidence of our ...”

“... complex’ in a speech about the death of ‘global Europe’. On the opposite side of the hall, a man from the Danube Institute gave me back copies of the Hungarian Conservative. He had come straight from a US Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest, where Viktor Orbán had called for Donald Trump to be returned to office. There was an ...”

“... but ripe for removal; like those who controlled the Light Programme in the years before rock’n’roll. Several novels and short stories have absorbed and portrayed the rave revolution over the years, and now raving is being given a history. There’s no consensus about its origins: to some of the writers discussed ...”

“... not treated with the proper respect. She approaches a nurse:QM: Don’t you know who I am?Nurse: No, dear, but if you go over and ask the lady at the desk she’ll probably be able to tell you.14 January. Most of the headlines this morning quote Bush’s remark that they have given Saddam Hussein ‘a spanking’, a homely term which nicely obscures the ...”

“... Our Synthetic Environment was admired by some prominent scientists but dismissed in the press. ‘No one is going to stop the world so that someone who would like to get off will be able to,’ the New York Times reviewer said. A year later Bookchin first read about the new science of ecology. ‘Every philosophical revolution was revolutionised by ...”

“... The idea that the nation is becoming insolvent has spread very widely, and nothing Obama has said, no testimony from the experts he calls to his side, has begun to quell the popular fear. Yet two-thirds of the Tea Partiers support both Social Security and Medicare (the national healthcare now enjoyed by everyone over 65). Why Obama’s people did not choose to ...”

“... is anywhere with wall space and a price list. It doesn’t have to be a white cube or a turbine hall, an old chapel or a revamped industrial unit. Corporate operations are generous with their holdings: Jim Dine figures you glimpse from an arcade, secured by thick glass and ever-vigilant surveillance systems, large pieces by major names lost in Edenic ...”

“... extend to Muslims, whom he would monitor and regulate. He has claimed that parts of Europe are ‘no-go zones’ under Sharia law, where police authorities are terrified to go and where women must wear veils, but, in a television interview, could not name any specific examples. They could have picked Carly Fiorina, the only Republican woman in the ...”

“... his apprenticeship with Thomas Hudson. In 1762 Francis Knowle Clark Mundy inherited Markeaton Hall. He had Wright paint him and five of his friends in the livery of the Markeaton Hunt – his father and five of his friends had sat to Devis 13 years before. Wright poses them casually. Harry Peckham stands with hand on hip; he was to die after breaking his ...”

“... mischievous matchmakers, innocent fun, uileann pipes, sea-wind in the hair. Even if you swap John Ford’s Ireland for something more urban and contemporary, say that of Roddy Doyle, in which a good night out is more likely to involve soul music and a ‘ride’, it is still possible to find yourself idealising: Ford and Doyle (pre-Paddy Clarke and ...”

“... met Americans, Germans and Australians drawn there by Manchester’s reputation. The Hacienda is no longer dominant in club culture, but night-clubbing remains as much a part of the cultural life of the city as the Hallé Orchestra, the cinemas, the theatres. The recession has hit hard, and for many clubbers the precious few hours on the dance floor on a ...”