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“... Eames furniture at ridiculously low prices . . . Anybody who answers that ad really quickly is de facto smart, alert, greedy and hip.’ ‘I turned into furniture,’ is what the characters in his first book, Generation X, say when they are intoxicated or exhausted and on the point of crashing out. Miss Wyoming is Douglas Coupland’s fifth novel, his ...”

“... and sees that it’s time for her meeting with Bernard Stonestreet, an ad exec in ‘a Paul Smith suit, more specifically the 118 jacket and the 11T trouser’. Cayce, by contrast, wears a ‘museum-grade replica of a US MA-1 flying jacket . . . created by Japanese obsessives’. Afterwards there’s lunch, ‘the food California-inflected ...”

“... the fragile security of the nursery, suffers a metaphoric death when taken from his domestic Eden. De Quincey, who writes obsessively of such processes of bereavement, is inclined to make a fact of the metaphor: ‘The rules of Eton require that a boy on the foundation should be there twelve years: he is superannuated at eighteen, consequently he must come at ...”

“... Last year, the Society of St Vincent de Paul spent €6.1 million giving people in Ireland food. This year, it says that requests for food are up 50 per cent, that calls in general are up 35 per cent and in Dublin 50 per cent, and that 25 per cent of callers are new clients, many of whom were contributors to the charity at the church gates last year ...”

“... in the seat of consciousness nor at his nerve ends, but in a generalised feeling of being Michel de Montaigne. He was not alone in almost, so to speak, losing it. In the second chapter of Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau recounts how, on 24 October 1776, outside Paris, he was rushed by an enormous Great Dane. He calculated at once that his only ...”

“... living in England and France and dreaming of the frontier, the second by a self-described ‘man without a country’, an American brought up in England and Ireland who, writing in Los Angeles, longed for the country from which he had exiled himself. We are undergoing a Chandler revival. The Library of America has published his complete works in two ...”

“... mass media, society at large? There is a comic if accidental illustration of this point. Alan de Lille, writes Dronke, said once that ‘because authority has a waxen nose, that can be bent in different ways, she must be fortified by reason.’ Alan, he says, was recalling a phrase of Thierry of Chartres, himself recalling Plato. But many years before ...”

“... always reflected this distance. A second, more particular reason for underlining that side of the man lies in these books, and the new wave of Gramscian interpretation they stand for. Mouffe, Buci-Glucksmann and Sassoon are all on broadly the same track. They are in search of a new revolutionary ideology for the European Left as a whole; and they are ...”

“... in Bonn. Its wonder years were the late Forties, when Christian Democrat politicians, de-Nazified and with certificates in their waistcoat-pockets to prove it, spun webs of intrigue between the padded booths; when the Bundestag still convened among the stuffed animals at the Museum König a hundred yards away; and the political city had not yet ...”

“... spread by the apostles themselves – it is noteworthy that Gibbon has very little to say about St Paul – it was during their lifetimes that it had been spread by the miraculous gifts they had received on the day of Pentecost. Chelsum suspected Gibbon of following the tactics of Conyers Middleton, a crucial figure in all this controversy, who in his Free ...”

“... it, even though it would soon be in ruins. They took up propaganda work with the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, a not quite Trotskyist party of which Trotsky himself was fiercely critical. The POUM’s members (including a number of its leaders) were drawn from the Left and Right Opposition to the Comintern, though it’s commemorated for its ...”

“... At these times he was indeed the ‘spectator ab extra’ that Coleridge called him, seeing man outwardly ennobled, or men in patterns, pageants, processions, that pleased his creativity and did not intrude too much upon his consciousness. Where Pirie, more solicitous of the student, the novice or the amateur, stresses that Wordsworth is a human being ...”

“... mistress into what students of more humdrum disciplines would probably want to call ‘a man’: a Jean, this is to say, as opposed to a Jeanne. It is not the first detail that Mrs Willis would have noticed about ‘Mlle’ Duval, who was probably a smoker, but she would have rumbled her in the end. ‘Mallarmé loved cigarettes,’ says ...”

“... at the heart of high Modernism – as exemplified by, say, Eliot’s strict division between the man that suffers and the mind that creates, or Yeats’s delight in pitting antithetical forces against each other. But Olson went further still, hoping to undo the entire Western tradition of rational, dialectical thinking, the ‘inaccurate estimate of reality ...”

“... to negotiate with terrorist kidnappers in Beirut to escape the meaninglessness of his art. Falling Man is a modest and quiet book about a large aftermath. It captures the turn in the three years after 9/11 to a new feeling, still active in 2007, of a contemporary American state of suspension, after the worst had happened and the nation perhaps played its hand ...”