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“... part of Molly’s memory of weekend mornings when all four of them – including her husband, David, who is absent through work for most of the novel – would lie together on the big bed: ‘Every single other thing – from the exhaustion of the week to evolution itself – is in the interest of this. This pure lack of desire. The need for absolutely ...”

“... circles and scenes.One place where this crossover logic was always embraced was the Loft, run by David Mancuso. On any given night, the playlist might include club hits like Taana Gardner’s ‘Heartbeat’, the Peech Boys’ ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’ or Fingers Inc’s ‘Mystery of Love’; but you’d also likely hear Marianne Faithfull and Yoko ...”

“... Vilnius, then part of the Russian empire, in 1914, he grew up under Polish rule before moving to Nice with his mother in the late 1920s. After studying law he joined the French air force in 1938, but was held back from the front line by suspicion of his foreign background and/or by antisemitism. When Pétain signed the armistice Gary stole a plane with some ...”

“... I don’t know about the robot duck, yet. But the Giant Beetroot comes straight from something in David Hume.This method, it should be obvious, has nothing to do with the weakly whacky. It caricatures, it counterfactualises and it reductio-ad-absurdums. But it does so in strict relation to real historical sources, in an oddly angled, yet almost geometrically ...”

“... dog, has written a play, premiering at Quahog, which ‘all the playwrights’ (i.e. Yasmina Reza, David Mamet and me) duly go and see – and rubbish. They had first of all asked if they could use me as a cartoon character to which I graciously agreed (not saying that I felt it was the highlight of my career). It was then they asked if I would voice ...”

“... invention of powered flight is so familiar that it’s easy to think we know all about it. David McCullough’s excellent biography The Wright Brothers brings the story back to life with facts that the non-specialist either doesn’t know or has blotted out with a misplaced broad brush. Yeah yeah, we get it: the brothers were provincial tinkerers who ...”

“... was inventively foul-mouthed, he hated Middle English, and he was quite good at impersonating David Cecil, or Cess-hole (though not so good as Amis, at whose relentless mimicries Larkin usually guffawed). Larkin also drank a lot – beer, mostly – and merciless derision appeared to be his social forte. He was indeed the sort of chap who knew exactly ...”

“... the Paris Review, McSweeney’s and the New Yorker. He is also a journalist, specialising, like David Foster Wallace, in first-person-singular expeditions into curious reaches of American culture. Tower’s non-fiction adventures have included a bicycle odyssey along the New Orleans levee a year after Hurricane Katrina, a search for a possibly extinct ...”

“... themselves as, and were, the ‘niggers’ of the antiwar movement, which by and large favoured nice, articulate, clean-living middle-class draft dodgers over working-class anti-heroes. At the time, few of the boys would have viewed their outcast experience, as I came to see it, as a rite of passage. My problem was that almost as soon as I began working ...”

“... rough sleepers and drug casualties, and nobody is bringing them any food-aid benefits. ‘Have a nice day, have a nice day, have a nice day’ is the endless mantra from the Big Issue salesman, wasting his unintended scorn on the passing mob.As you move through Spitalfields, the former ...”

“... space”, third turn, and (in the case of other-initiation) second turn.’ It could be David Coleman warming up for a commentary on slalom surfing (Coleman, incidentally, puts his foot into a footnote in Forms of Talk). Systematic Goffman is not. He writes in a vivid, impressionistic way which he concedes is often, as in much of Forms of ...”

“... his own. Not everyone in the business swooned in admiration when they first encountered Wal-Mart. David Glass, who years later succeeded Walton as chairman of the company, travelled down to Harrison, Arkansas, to see the opening of one of the new shops: It was the worst retail store I had ever seen. Sam had brought a couple of trucks of watermelons in and ...”

“... his place up there with the other monsters of the age – a ‘rotten compromise’. It would be nice to think that he could have done more to take them on. But in the absence of the dictatorial powers that he eschewed as president, it is hard to see how. He could have tried calling the bluff of the Southern blowhards in Congress. The trouble is they ...”

“... He wrote The Seven Journeys at this time (it wasn’t published until 1944) and made friends with David Archer, the publisher and bookseller whose Scott Street Arts Centre in Glasgow was a venue for the avant-garde of the interwar years. Graham met Dylan Thomas there, who was sufficiently impressed to include a Graham poem at the end of one of his own ...”

“... wondering what they’re hiding. Sand’s investigation is more than justified, and it would be nice to report that his effort is subtle, sober and perceptive, as wide-ranging as it is morally serious. But it isn’t. Hobsbawm and the rest notwithstanding, The Invention of the Jewish People was a messy polemic – helter-skelter, tendentious and ...”