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“... of the ‘right on’, the ideologically pre-processed. One wishes the same could be said for André Brink’s States of Emergency, which should perhaps be described as a would-be novel. Its subtitle is ‘Notes towards a Love Story’, and it represents – minimally fictionalises – an attempt by a South African writer, ...”

“... of the period of minority rule. The anthology of fiction, A Land Apart, was, say its editors, André Brink and J.M. Coetzee, ‘compiled amid the tumult of the uprisings of 1985’, although the writers they choose to represent had not then had the time to reflect upon that tumult in their work, and almost certainly have not had sufficient time ...”

“... of the Mark Twain era. I think a failure of inwardness occurs because, to avoid this stereotype, André Brink substitutes for it at crucial moments a very different model – and in the historical circumstances of 1825 an unlikely one: a modern existential and political model. ‘Galant, who are you?’ asks his woman. ‘Don’t ask me yet. Only a free ...”

“... English-language prose writers in South Africa, from Olive Schreiner through Nadine Gordimer and André Brink to Mongane Serote, have tried to reconcile these conflicting claims, the claims of history and fiction, by writing in the realist mode. When Coetzee began to write, in the Seventies, he was one of the first South African novelists to act on the ...”

“... history of poetry from Baudelaire to himself via Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Valéry, Tzara and André Breton. The meeting led to the publication of two books in 1947: Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique, a polemical anthology which includes Isou’s ‘Larmes de jeune fille’, and a semi-autobiographical novel, L’Agrégation ...”

“... dancers, or be ‘putting on a show’ as in the Garland/Rooney films: they just live as if on the brink of singing, they move as if about to break into dance, and dance as if it could be walking. I like to think this is what the young Truffaut had in mind when he slid across the floor of a Paris apartment to swoon at scriptwriters Betty Comden and Adolf ...”

“... has nonetheless attracted more than its share of talented chroniclers, including Crane Brinton, André Castelot, Jean Orieux and the French politician Michel Poniatowski (not to mention the prolific historian Louis Madelin, to whose 1944 effort an American publisher appended the subtitle ‘A Vivid Biography of the Amoral, Unscrupulous and Fascinating ...”

“... slating from L’Humanité, like the other bêtes noires of the French Communist Party, among them André Gide, whom the PCF never forgave for his Retour d’URSS, any more than it forgave Blum’s L’Echelle Humaine. It is worth noting that throughout this career – the most stylish touch – ambition never reared its head (which does not mean that it was ...”

“... he was in St-Tropez in the summer of 1904 (working with Paul Signac), ‘a man driven daily to the brink of desperation by inner tension, insomnia and the paralysing demons of frustration and self-doubt’. The certainties of neo-Impressionism, of Signac’s systematic development of Seurat’s ‘Divisionist’ principles, held him for a while, but a year ...”

“... default in history, and Brazil looked – in the eyes of the financial markets – to be on the brink of the same precipice. To restore investor confidence, Lula installed an unblinkingly orthodox economic team at the Central Bank and Ministry of Finance, which hiked interest rates yet further and cut public investment, to achieve a primary fiscal surplus ...”

“... US, as well as for European figures like Elmar Altvater in Germany and Michael Löwy and the late André Gorz in France, when he admitted that his work dwelt on ‘the reconstruction of Marx’s approach rather than its application’. Ecomarxism spent its first decades in methodological throat-clearing, outlining but not yet undertaking a new kind of ...”

“... and he became flustered by my silence. But what can you say about your own life to someone on the brink of theirs? I didn’t cry when Philip died either. I’d seen him shrivel into a brown husk, the taut dry skin stretched over his skeleton like a mummified body excavated from some desert tomb. I’d seen him in his wheelchair with an oxygen mask clamped to ...”

“... party and jailing 140,000 citizens without charge. To many, it seemed that India was on the brink of dictatorship.In fact what had happened was an exercise, on a much larger scale than ever before, of a traditional instrument of British rule, dubbed by one of its officials with the oxymoron ‘civil martial law’: mass arrests, suspension of ordinary ...”