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“... and to render him finally visible. The Vision of Elena Silves has a narrative which flits back and forward over Peru’s apocalyptic years, from 1965 to 1986. At the starting-point a philosophical young revolutionary, Gabriel Lung (he has Chinese blood), falls in love with Elena Silves (she has Portuguese blood). Elena has a religious vision and performs a ...”

“... generation. Crosland’s life now settled down. He met and later married an American journalist, Susan Barnes, and was selected at Grimsby, a seat he held from 1959 until his death. Thus based, he was well equipped to become a shaper of the nation’s future, which was what he had always intended. Somehow it did not happen. In conventional ...”

“... of 1871 looked backwards to a pre-capitalist past, doomed to defeat; the anarchism of 1968 looks forward to the future society almost within our grasp, certain of success.Well no, actually, I don’t think so. Although it is true that a certain esprit de soixante-huit survived the year of its birth, and had its final – and not least honourable – moments ...”

“... Several​ of the last century’s finest non-fiction writers – Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin – longed to be novelists. In interviews with the Paris Review, each touched on the tension and insecurity involved in their dual métier. Sontag wrote in surprisingly aspirational tones of ‘the novelist [I’d] finally given myself permission to be ...”

“... message on my Facebook Wall. Self-destructive thoughts when forced to admit they can’t. Like Susan Boyle, all one wants is to have one’s little life back. B., thank god, seems fine. Calls frequently from Cambridge on the Crackberry; thinks I’m making an insane fuss about moving five houses up the street. Full of kind spousal forbearance when I tell ...”

“... a dangerous thing to do,’ whereupon the boy apologises. However, another of the group then steps forward and says, ‘Are you father and son?’ While it’s not a question that requires an answer, it’s not friendly either. I say, ‘Come away,’ and we walk on.29 May. Remember as a child at Halliday Place in Armley when Dad was rubbing his face with a ...”

“... nor loyalists to tell the truth, while 92 per cent didn’t trust the British state either. As Susan McKay describes in Bear in Mind These Dead (2008), nationalist and unionist communities have both at times brandished their grief at one another; in the mid-2000s, they held rival victims’ demonstrations in Belfast and Dublin respectively. Even agreeing ...”

“... different from anything previously experienced. All sorts of omens are read as indicating the way forward out of modernity’s blood-drenched darkness. But how? Take the case of anthropology. The great lurch forward into market-driven unification – suggesting a world in some ways akin to one nation and state – was bound ...”

“... like the conflicts in a sitcom, predictably easy to resolve, and what’s left to drag the reader forward are Mordden’s frequent pronouncements of his Grand Theme: that gay people have an important role to play in history. When, for example, über-gay man Frank announces that he will come to San Francisco, Mordden writes: ‘Indeed, Frank was ...”

“... of foreign technology and its abrupt termination with the expulsion of the Soviets. The Great Leap Forward, which followed, was a demonstration of self-reliance. The period of the Great Leap is described with authority and a wealth of detail in the middle volume of Roderick MacFarquhar’s formidable Origins of the Cultural Revolution. It was a failure which ...”

“... same years when antiquarians worried that Rome was consuming its own substance to fuel its revival.Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson tells the story of these antiquarians and what they learned from the ruins that obsessed them. Their sensibility, as she shows, was itself ancient. In the age of Augustus, as Rome became a marble city, poets looked back with ...”

“... Gaddis (1982) was awarded a fellowship at the age of 60, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1984) at 57, Susan Sontag (1990) at 59, Ernest J. Gaines (1993) at 60. Thomas Pynchon was a relatively young 51 when he won, but by 1988 already the author of his major works. The Foundation nonetheless took a big punt on the genius of Richard Powers, who was awarded his ...”

“... fear, then a white light from which some beneficent doorman out of central casting steps forward to welcome the newly departed. This anteroom of the world to come is taken for granted by millions, including possibly the same 86 per cent of Americans who told the Larry King Show that they believed in aliens and almost certainly the proportion of that ...”

“... be easy for a mayor to stay friendly with all of them. Londoners keen on radical change can look forward to a great deal of frustration over the coming years, as any actions are likely to take a long time to negotiate and carry out.By contrast, the mayor will have much more direct control over the new ‘functional bodies’: Transport for London, the London ...”

“... Afew years ago​ Susan Neiman published an article titled ‘History and Guilt’, which asked whether America can ‘face up to the terrible reality of slavery in the way that Germany has faced up to the Holocaust’. Her new book tries to answer that question, considering the ways in which the US can learn from Germany’s Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit, its ‘working through the past ...”