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“... 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 ...”

“... attacks, she responded that the term was ‘painfully accurate’, and mounted a defence of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, as if the prescriptive Englishman posed the already canonised Americans a grave threat. ‘We cannot be all the writers all the time,’ she wrote. ‘We can only be who we are … Writers do not write what they want, they ...”

“... on trumped up charges of incest, adultery and plotting to murder the king, and beheaded on Tower Green on 19 May. Tremlett does not say, but it was widely rumoured that the same morning, the candles round Catherine’s grave in Peterborough Cathedral burst spontaneously into flame. Any biography of Catherine has to stand comparison with ...”

“... bribery, according to a recent Buzzfeed investigation, with the FBI offering to exchange a green card for information. The smaller the group of people you are looking for in comparison to the size of the population, and the lower your tolerance for missing even one of them, the greater the number of false positives your search will produce. This is why ...”

“... also find pleasure in Shakespeare; there are no admirers of Piers Plowman or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight who cannot also appreciate The Canterbury Tales. But it is not hard to find enthusiastic readers of Marvell or Spenser or Dryden or Donne who cannot warm to Milton, and make no apology for it. Anti-Milton sentiment became respectable literary opinion ...”

“... of the set. Perfect. She looks up at me and rolls her eyes. I give her a thumbs up. Then she spits green fluid into the half-moon receptacle. Achak doesn’t watch much TV in the refugee camps, but he goes to school, plays with his friends, obsesses over girls, gets a job with a Japanese NGO, arranges basketball games, joins a drama group, goes to Nairobi to ...”