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“... scatology a subversive weapon. Sometimes Newton’s pleasure seems merely ‘schoolboyish’ – David Alexander’s word – because what Crowninshield would later call the ‘grossness and somewhat fat overstatement’ overwhelm any political point. Not so, however, when Newton shows Napoleon Establishing French Quarters in Italy by having the Pope kiss ...”

“... a white refrigerator in preference to the presumably more life-affirming salmon-pink or pale green. Such a self-confirming closed circle of biographical method does not do justice either to Arbus’s work or, indeed, to her recurrent depressions. But Sartre’s to-be-famous children differ from the subject of this biography in one very evident ...”

“... possibility that some riots may be modelled on the carnival or Saturnalia, that they may be fun. David Matza claimed some years ago, in his book Delinquency and Drift, that criminologists have taken delinquency rather too seriously, casting it as the fateful pursuit of those intent on profit or a grim lawlessness. He claimed that since Frederick Thrasher ...”

“... lecturer in the early Sixties. He was one of a generation of Auckland students which included David Lange and a number of his present Cabinet. A few years later Ihimaera’s fiction began to appear. He was the first Maori writer to give an account from the inside of tribal life and rituals. His novel Tangi was widely read and admired, and it was followed ...”

“... across the tablecloths, the little brimful glasses of chocolate, the cream cakes in rose and green which so curiously resembled edible jewels, and Councillor Sorgsam remarked, right in the midst of May: “There will be no war, gentlemen!” ’ (The Emperor’s Tomb). Most memorable of all are the descriptions of landscapes, of little X-shaped garrison ...”

“... rhetoric of the media tends to trivialise the reality of the drug problem, just as films like The Green Berets and Rambo trivialise the reality of the Vietnam War. Also like them, it serves as a kind of jingoism to screen off the hopelessness and bungling – the no-win situation – that is the reality of the much-vaunted ‘War on Drugs’. This ...”

“... figure.’ The next day he settles on a shepherd plaid shawl (rather than on the large blue and green plaid in the sketch) for the woman. On the 24th he spends two hours dressing up the lay figure of the man, and on the 30th he is working on the ‘coat of the Emigrant from the one I made on purpose two winters ago at Hampstead & have [never] worn since ...”

“... he was easy-going and funny. He could also be boring even then. He was inclined to go on about the Green Committee, to which he had been official secretary in his Civil Service days. This had had something to do with fixing miners’ wages during the war, and had given him a tediously detailed knowledge of the coal industry. Another favourite was his ...”

“... air, Which seems a sense of joy to yield To the bare trees, and mountains bare, And grass in the green field. But a mild March morning, like the one the quatrain celebrates, can turn instantly into a scene of unheralded pain. In Wordsworth’s countryside the dead surround and haunt the living. He has a cast list of figures in extremity – fragile ...”

“... Style, Style, Style, beside a drawing of a portly lady in a yellow dress and a pink umbrella and a green fan, it says: ‘Fashion wasn’t what you wore someplace anymore; it was the whole reason for going.’ And this was the first of Warhol’s very good perceptions: fashion is about event and situation and attitude. It is about how people are in a given ...”

“... so intellectual supporters of the Iraq War – among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment – have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving ...”

“... the side of the regime.  A chat with a prominent economic commentator. He sees definite signs of green shoots. The stock market and the pound are rising, the banks and the housing market have stabilised. ‘The measures taken last autumn have stopped an immediate crisis.’  Rumours that unnamed backbenchers are organising a round robin letter, calling on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sediment settles behind Glen Canyon Dam and what was once a hot red river emerges as a cool green one, too cool for many of its species of endangered fish. Occasionally a thunderstorm over a tributary sends down enough sediment to turn it red again for a day or two. Along the way, the river is grabbed and squeezed for water to make the cities explode in ...”

“... in Axler’s proposed salvation-by-child, or by love or sex (‘He who forms a tie is lost’ – David Kepesh’s friend George O’Hearn, telling it straight in The Dying Animal). They won’t save him, and nor will solitude: it’s the absence of ties which has brought him to this pass. Axler has no family: no memories of dear Morty Sabbath to stay his ...”