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“... books hug the East Coast strip bounded by Princeton in the south (where she earned her PhD under Thomas Nagel) and Boston in the north. She has what Hobbes called libido sciendi. She’s absorbed by the relation between emotion and intellect, and in particular by genius. The off-chart mathematician Noam Himmel opens her first novel, The Mind-Body ...”

“... be set in a continuous mythic present. ‘I sprang from the Sorrento sailing-boat on to the little beach,’ the first chapter begins. Munthe was evidently a social chameleon, equally comfortable in the company of illiterate Italian gravediggers, American millionaires, European royalty, nomadic Sámi, nuns or artists. He adapts his style, too, without obvious ...”

“... from their landing-craft to confront an entrenched and ruthless enemy. Gates wisely hits the beach under a protective barrage of scholarly references and sources, deftly deployed. An initial outflanking movement proves immediately successful, drawing as it does on V.F. Calverton’s judgment of 1929 that, in respect of black contributions to American art ...”

“... school at 16, worked as a secretary, and wrote stories and poems to bring in cash. She met Dylan Thomas after their work appeared in the same paper: ‘He had won a prize for a poem … I knew it was derivative and I knew from what.’ They were briefly engaged, and she and her mother visited his family in Wales. She remembers someone remarking on ...”

“... into the lining of his hat and struggled ashore burdened with bags of treasure.Wading onto Chesil Beach, the surviving crew were faced with dozens, soon hundreds of villagers. Nearly every adult male from nearby Chickerell had arrived on the scene. Before you could say ‘pieces of eight’, organised crews of local fishermen were picking up the ...”

“... or a citizen of Haute Volta, and in 1984, a ‘Burkinabe’: the new head of state, Thomas Sankara, had combined two non-colonial languages to rename Haute Volta as Burkina Faso, ‘the land of the upright’. By then Sory’s work had consigned him to the land of the slightly stooped, gazing through the viewfinder or bent over the developing ...”

“... a celebration of hip and chaotic capitalism. It is written in the regulation giddy style that Thomas Frank and the Baffler school in Chicago have dissected so well. Once again we are presented with the lives of the saints of middle management, Leadbeater’s magnificent pilgrims are full of daring. They struggle for personal fulfilment and venture ...”

“... need to pretend they’ve read it, don’t say they’ve always been meaning to take it to the beach. I hope I’m wrong about the novel’s actual readership, for the sake of several publishers and many readers who would immensely enjoy the book if they got to it, but I don’t think I’m wrong about the way things look. Fielding and Sterne loved Don ...”

“... that doubled as a water-hearse and plonked in the middle of it a coffin. It was like a moment that Thomas Mann might have conjured up and it made me plan to go to the Lido and take a look at the Grand Hotel des Bains, now a shell, where he set Death in Venice. More than sixty years after the story was written, Katia Mann, ...”

“... the least worst choice from a pack of bizarre characters seemingly drawn from reality TV shows or Thomas Pynchon novels, but he’s not finding much love, even at his own coronation. Only 27 per cent of Americans think that he’s a ‘likeable’ guy. (Obama gets 61 per cent.) On television he projects a strange combination of self-satisfaction and an ...”

“... Avenue Bridge, where John Berryman jumped to his death; the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas supposedly drank the 18 whiskeys that killed him; 23 Fitzroy Road, where Plath laid her head on a folded towel in the gas oven; Missolonghi, per Byron; Rome, to the Keats-Shelley House; Vienna, where Auden bore out his own prophecy: ‘I shall probably die ...”

“... seen the woman who works in the chip-shop swimming naked in the sea. At night they go down to the beach to watch her. ‘We waited for hours, till Jamie’s face became pinched and pale, till my teeth began to chatter.’ They huddle close to keep warm, tearful at the cold and their failure, for the woman of course never comes. Eventually Jamie runs into the ...”

“... me violently by the arm and stared steadfastly on the white surf that broke upon the beach under our feet … I demanded of him if he were in pain – but he only answered by saying: ‘There it is again! There!’ … He saw, as plainly as he then saw me, a naked child rise from the sea, and clap its hands as in joy, smiling at him.Shelley’s ...”

“... adultery in their hotel room on the Costa Brava from a rented apartment 300 yards away along the beach. As the hour passes and the camera steadily zooms in from maximum field to extreme close-up, the narrator’s role shifts disconcertingly between those of film-maker, audience and actor in his perverted drama. Cocaine Nights explores similar terrain more ...”

“... grew to trust it, would climb on its back and be taken out to sea and brought back to the beach. Then one day the governor, for reasons best known to himself, poured scented oil on the dolphin’s back, perhaps as a blessing. It did not reappear for many days, and then seemed listless and dejected; but as it regained strength it returned to its ...”